


The Fatal Softness in the Earth

by paradiamond



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Communication Issues, Hermann POV, M/M, Uprising went one way and I'm choosing to ignore it, do not need to have read the book or seen the movie to understand, extremely noncompliant with Uprising, inspired by Annihilation, post Pacific Rim 2013, scary nature, theme is like romance but also terror science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-04-07 23:24:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14091990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradiamond/pseuds/paradiamond
Summary: In the aftermath of the war, Hermann and Newt are kept busy investigating the long term effects of the Kaiju Blue phenomenon. On the verge of a breakthrough, they head into the heart of the San Francisco Exclusion Zone, the oldest, and therefore most advanced, site of Blue contamination. But what they find goes far beyond what they expected.





	1. INVASION

**Author's Note:**

> AU inspired by Annihilation by Jeff VanderMere (which is amazing and you should read it). Not a direct AU is in Newmann dropped into Area X, but as in thematic and artistic elements of Annihilation applied to Pacific Rim canon. So unreliable narrator/nature horror/low tech/etc. Enjoy! 
> 
> ***
> 
> “While we were in that corridor, in that transitional space, nothing could touch us. We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.” Annihilation, ch.1, p.15.

“Do you want to know how dumb I am?” Newt asked, or complained, really. 

Hermann didn't look up, busy inputting his latest findings from the radiation detector into the notebook one by one. “No.” 

“I was actually worried about not having enough to do after the breach closed.”

That forced a smirk out of him, regardless of his wishes, and he glanced up, looking at Newt from across the tent they shared as a research space. When Newt saw him looking he smiled back, the combined effect of his uncontrolled expression and his hair sticking up at all angles due to the fact that he had pushed his safety goggles up and over his forehead making him seem far younger than he actually was. “Did you really?”

“Yeah man,” Newt tossed an unidentified object into the trash with a flourish. It had a large biohazard symbol printed on it, and seemed to Hermann a ridiculous reminder of the wishful thinking of the operation. Or the futility of control. Technically, everything in the Blue Zone was contaminated. 

Newt sighed and stripped off his gloves, shoving his fingers into his eyes, under his glasses. “I was like, I had a waking nightmare about getting stuck on the lecture circuit forever, trotted out like some prize winning horse and then going back to my dumb university job, for like, the rest of my life.” He put his hands down and looked across the tent at Hermann. 

Hermann just stared back at him placidly. “Horse?”

Newt let out a sort of groan. “Asshole. Anyway, I think when that inevitably happens, I think I'll actually be able to appreciate it now. I could use a rest.”

“You'd be miserable in a week,” Hermann said, and set his notebook down with a snap, next to a pile of Newt’s things which had migrated to his side already. On top was a list Newt had erased so thoroughly that the paper had worn almost all the way through, showing the tan of the table through the almost hole, a near completion. The sight irritated him, but then, almost everything about Newt did. “Back out here or somewhere like it in two.”

Newt laughed. “Maybe. Probably. Did I tell you about the Kingfisher I saw? It was totally weird, completely out of season for this area.”

“No.”

“Well-”

“Likely because you knew I wouldn't care.”

Another man would glare. Newt grinned, all teeth. “You hungry?”

Hermann shrugged, and Newt jumped into action, stripping off his outer layer, a sort of baggy plastic smock haphazardly mashed together with what was essentially a lightweight hazmat suit without arms. It was a rule set by the organizers of the project, one that Newt had agreed to abide by, likely to soften the blow coming in the form of the rules Hermann suspected he fully intended to break. 

Next came the tan shirt, which was filthy at the sleeves, leaving Newt naked from the waist up. Hermann didn't blink at the display. They'd gotten some smirks early on from the other members of their expedition, especially since they were sharing a living tent as well, but they'd worked in such close quarters in such a volatile environment for so long it hardly seemed to matter. Both he and Newt had made use of the decontamination shower back in the Hong Kong lab more than once. This time, Hermann’s gaze caught on Newt’s tattoos, and stuck. They looked especially odd, out of place in the otherwise drab tent, perhaps most of all because the images, always garish, always elegant, were now a shrine to the dead. 

The first time he saw them, Hermann had been disgusted, and that was when it was only his arms. They had been perhaps the most galling part of an already trying day. The first day of his new lab partner, an old annoyance, and older friend, and he rolled up his sleeves to show monsters. 

Newt, of course, was never wrong, even when he was. “What? We should pretend they don’t exist?” Then he stripped off his shirt, of all things, in the middle of the lab and bared the monotoned outline of his next creation, an even bigger slap in the face for those who had lost their lives, the bones and shadows of the demon Onibaba staring out from his chest. He pointed to a spot on his upper right arm, making the creatures on the left shift. “See, if you want to understand something, you can’t judge it. You just have to let it be.” 

Outrage was the least of it. Hermann had glared daggers at him from across the lab, already planning out the path of a taped line to divide them, angry to the point of quiet. “Put your shirt back on this instant, doctor. That is not the point and you know it.” 

Back then the space between them seemed like a yawning chasm, and for a long moment as Newt rolled his eyes and chattered about nothing Hermann had wondered what he had ever seen in this man at all. It was a punishment, a mockery of his ridiculous dreams of a true friend of his mind, in science, in so many ways when he was writing those blasted letters. It took him a long time to realize that what it actually had been was a misunderstanding.

Ten years later and he was standing in tent as Newt slipped back into his normal day clothes like a second skin, apparently just as comfortable in khaki as skinny jeans and ties. All of it was lightweight, mostly waterproof, and hideous. They were issued heavy boots and head lamps, along with a small black box, not bigger than a keychain, with a circle in the center that supposedly turned red in the presence of ‘dangerous elements’, whatever that meant. Hermann had his strapped to his hip, and it bounced when he walked. Newt had the bad habit of leaving his in the tent. 

The San Francisco Exclusion Zone, or whatever they would decide to call it now, managed to be both broken down and wild, like the other early kill zones, but more so, since it was the very first. As such, it called for a certain amount of consideration, even in dress. With the ease he displayed, Newt must have experienced something similar in previous fieldwork. The same comfort could not be said of Hermann, though he tolderated it for the sake of the mission. If nothing else, he was a professional. 

“Ready?” 

Hermann didn’t dignify it with a response, too busy preparing himself to go back outside, something he had avoided as much as possible since the start of the mission three days ago. The Blue Zone, formally toxic, formally deadly radioactive, extended far past San Francisco itself, encompassing the ruins of Oakland, the surrounding metropolitan areas, and ending just outside of Sacramento, which was where they’d begun. 

Their mission was to follow the second part of the Trespasser’s path first rather than starting from the sea and doubling back to Oakland as he had done twelve years ago. To do so would have been foolish, even if Newt complained about the ‘lack of authenticity’ as if they were on some sort of morbid tour instead of a serious scientific mission. From point to point it was thirty five miles, and littered with oddities that had gone ignored while the world had more pressing issues to contend with. Now, they had time. 

As they crossed the open space in the ring formed by all the tents, Newt called out to everyone they passed, as though they were all old friends and the other members of the expedition hadn’t already been staring. It seemed that everywhere they went, they were watched. Hermann ignored them as he always did, just like he ignored the pain in his legs, just as he had done in the Shatterdome. It was a familiar scrutiny, though it was unlikely to fade as it eventually did in Hong Kong since their mission here would be much, much shorter. 

“Alright, Doctors?” 

They both stopped, Newt because he couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk and Hermann because he wouldn’t be rude to a commanding officer, which as far as Hermann understood about the structure of the operation, was what the Special Analyst was, since he appeared to have no real function within camp except to keep some important Secretary informed of the goings on. Newt grinned up at him. “Hey man, what’s up?” 

Next to him, the man Hermann knew was a former Assault Specialist from the Peruvian front gave Newt a long look. On another man, it might have been laced with amusement, but this one was too big, the lines on his face etched too deep. He had no expression on his face at all. 

On the other hand, the Analyst, casually handsome in a sandy haired, ambiguously young sort of way, and who always seemed a moment away from randomly announcing that it was a nice day out, didn’t seem phased in the slightest. “I just wanted to make sure you have everything you need for you work.” 

“Well, I could use a protein synthesizer and an industrial grade DNA sequencer!” Newt laughed and put his hands on his hips, looking every inch the hyperactive child. “Even the crappy one I had at the lab before, it’ not exactly easy working under these conditions. Not to mention, you let Hermann have his radiation thing.” 

Hermann rolled his eyes. “You know full well what a Geiger-”

“Yeah, I do, but that’s not the point!” He flapped his arms like a bird, even colorful like one with his sleeves rolled up, as though it would help him make his point. 

The outdoors invigorated Newt, the consummate biologist, even like this in the heat of destruction. He never really thrived inside their lab, buried several stories in the earth. The scientist inside him brought the natural world to them, creating a chaos with a heart of order. When Newt looked around, Hermann knew he was seeing it all differently. “Newton-” 

The Analyst jumped in before he could say anything else, his bright eyes flashing in the sun. “I understand it’s difficult, and we really appreciate your cooperation. Safety first, you know?” 

Newt put his arms back down, automatically wary at being managed in any way and far too smart not to notice every time. “Sure, but we still haven’t really been briefed on why-” 

“It’s classified,” the Specialist said, in a tone that suggested he had spent the duration of the war trying and failing to develop the gravitas and control of someone like Marshall Pentecost. 

The Analyst laughed, and it was just practiced enough to make the hair on the back of Hermann’s neck stand up, since it sounded like his father at a cocktail party. “No need for all that, I’m sure. We’re just trying to avoid too much contamination.” 

Hermann frowned. It made only a limited amount of sense that Hermann, an expert physicist and coder, would be brought to an area where advanced technology wasn’t allowed. He might suspect that he had just been brought along as an addition, because of Newt, the actual biology expert in the Blue infected zone, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t investigating his own phenomena of scientific value, and it certainly didn’t mean he wasn’t paying attention. “Contamination in what sense?” 

For several seconds, no one answered him, and he could all but feel Newt’s blood pressure rising. The real problem, the one he didn't know how they would begin to fix, was acid rain, or whatever the Kaiju Blue name for it would be. Luckily for them, for the whole world really, they figured out early how degenerative the Blue was, and took measures to prevent its spread, so it likely wasn’t that. But then the Analyst waved a hand. “It’s just an over abundance of caution, I’m sure you understand.”

Hermann did. He grew up around military men. “Of course.” He grabbed Newt’s arm above the elbow with his free hand before he could say anything else, and pulled. To his surprise, Newt went with only minimal griping. 

Both men watched them as they left, and the various attendants and technicians continued to sneak glances at them as they passed. Before they reached the mess hall tent, Hermann chanced a glance back and spotted the Analyst, now standing alone with his hands on his hips, staring up at something. Hermann followed his gaze, and frowned, seeing nothing of note at first, except for the obvious. 

They were camped in a space that had clearly once held a building that had either been knocked down by Trespasser or by one of the bombs dropped to stop him, and as such was relatively flat. The entire area around them was in a similar state, overgrown with only a few remaining signs of what stood before, such as the odd blue flower colored bush that when disturbed, revealed a car at the center. Everything was like that to varying degrees. The other Blue Zones that had been left undisturbed were much the same way, though not to this extent. In the distance, Hermann could see some buildings still standing, their metal rusted but exposed. But anywhere Trespasser dripped blood, for this was where their weapons first started to make a dent, the land was changed. 

In a way it made sense, even if it seemed extreme at first glance. It was a well known fact that the Blue contaminated, damaged, and stained anything it touched. He and Newt had just seen the most recent example of that in Hong Kong during their first post-war mission. The Blue had sunk into the ground, scorching the Earth and eating through what got in its way if they couldn’t neutralize it first. And they hadn’t learned how to do that until five years ago. This place had sat with the Blue for twelve, and it showed. 

The wind shifted, sending a chill up his spine as he finally put together what the Analyst was looking at so intently. 

“Uh, Earth to Hermann?” 

Hermann turned back, annoyed, and saw Newt a few feet away, holding the tent curtain open. Slightly embarrassed, Hermann hurried over, his cane sinking into the earth just a bit with every step he took. 

***

“I just don’t like those guys,” Newt complained, striking out ahead again at the sight of food, plain as it was. He immediately started loading up a plate under the watchful gaze of the camp cook, whom Hermann took care to thank. 

“We were hardly given all the information in the Shatterdome. There’s no reason to think that it would be different now,” Hermann responded as they sat, in what he believed to be a reasonable manner. Newt rolled his eyes. 

“Yeah, but the world was ending! We were under attack!” He pointed at Hermann with the fork that had just been in his mouth. “It’s not ending now.” 

“What an inspired analysis.” 

“Dude.” 

“Forgive me for not taking your paranoia seriously.” 

“I’m not paranoid, I just don’t like to be kept in the dark.” Newt slouched forward with his whole body, causing his knee to come into contact with Herman’s under the table. If he noticed Hermann’s subsequent flinch, he didn’t show it, and he didn’t move away. They sat in silence for a few beautiful seconds before Newt started in again. “How long do you think it will take us to get to Oakland?” 

“Eight days,” Hermann responded dryly, annoyance building gradually in his chest. “Assuming the radiation levels remain benign, which isn’t a guarantee, and which you would know if you read the briefing.” 

Newt looked up and smiled, all mischief. “But I have you.” 

Hermann didn’t dignify that with a response, but he did subtly shift his foot forward, bring them into firmer contact, more so to see what kind of response he could get than to provoke a specific one. Predictably, he got nothing, and when Newt stayed quiet, his mind turned back, as it often did, to the immediate aftermath of the end of the war. 

They had both worried about what would happen next. Hermann put on a show about it now, about how he knew there would be work, probably for both of them, hopefully together, but he feared change, even when it was plainly good. No more monsters, no more hunting death. They threw themselves into making the work until something could be done, always filing, sending off reports, cleaning the lab. 

One of his strongest memories from that time was having to sit down due to the dizzying haze of ammonia and seeing Newt on his hands and knees, scrubbing the floor with single minded obsession.

“Out out damn spot,” he called out, softly, but Newt still heard. It was like that sometimes, no matter how quietly Hermann spoke. They just knew. 

Newt’s head snapped up. His eye was still bloodshot and it took Hermann physical effort not to go to him. “Uh- yeah. It's driving me crazy.”

Hermann frowned. “No, it's- never mind,” he trailed off when he put together the scene from its pieces. Newt was cleaning up his own blood, leftover from the frenzy of before. Hermann knew where it was because he studiously avoided looking at it. 

They lived in a sideways world, a mix of uncertain and solid. At least Hermann did. Newt simply behaved as though they’d be together forever, when the PPDC came and asked him to look at the most recent Blue Zone for biological contamination, he’d assumed that Hermann would come too, and Hermann hadn’t thought to stop him. 

It wasn’t uncommon for the Drift pilots, especially in the early days, to experience attachment as a physical force. If anything, it was encouraged. Anything to make them more effective, more together, more one with themselves. Hermann didn’t particularly appreciate being part of a phenomenon, but he liked it even less when he and Newt were apart, even now. 

He shifted his other foot forward, and Newt closed the gap, slotting himself neatly into the empty space. 

“Isn’t this place great?” Newt asked, his mouth full of food. True to the usual state of his manners, he wasn’t looking at Hermann at all, but staring out the small plastic window in the side of the tent. “The regrowth is amazing.” 

“And disturbing.” 

It wasn't a totally unknown phenomenon. Hermann had read about it, or maybe he heard Newt speak of it, before. The natural world bounced back fast in Blue Zone areas. Under normal circumstances it would have dominated scientific inquiry. But at the time there were monsters coming up out of the ocean and it simply hadn't been important. So Hermann had known about it, but seeing it was another thing entirely. 

What was really strange about the entire situation was that Trespasser wasn’t even taken down in Sacramento. Their weapons had barely made a dent at first. The damage, and the changes, would almost certainly increase as they followed the path farther west, to Oakland. What would it be like there? 

Hermann ran through the facts. His work, the things he found here, were puzzling, but made sense to him in a fundamental way. He understood energy fluctuations and radiation as concepts, even if their behavior was temporarily closed to him. Newt’s world of living change and adapting ecosystems did not. 

The Kaiju attacked cities, and left Blue behind. The Blue contaminated the area, and so people left, willingly or not. If untreated, the Bluemist acted as a corrosive agent, breaking things down, poisoning the air, and it made sense for nature to take over again, but this much, this soon? He picked at his food, only half listening to Newt’s ever building rant on interrupted bird migration. Nature was messy. He didn’t much care for it. But even Hermann, whose field focused on the building blocks of these things at an atomic level, sometimes missing the forest for the trees, could see that it was definitely too fast.

Still, he had the sense to keep his mouth shut, something that Newt couldn’t do for a moment, even now, while actively eating. Low tech was what they agreed to. Newt had mostly free reign in his work, though he complained about the lack of advanced sequencing equipment and other such nonsense, as though Hermann hasn’t been reduced to simply collecting data and more data on the energy fluctuations they’d barely been able to read from the outside and running only the most basic calculations. 

“Do you have all of your stuff?” 

Hermann blinked. “Pardon?” 

“You equipment,” Newt said, playing with his utensils. His plate was clean. “I can’t find one of my microscopes, I think one of the techs lost it.” 

“I’m sure they did not, Newton, and if you’re so concerned about it-”

“Keep an inventory and sign out my own stuff, yeah.” Newt rolled his eyes. “Sure, but we’ve only been here for like, a day.” 

Hermann smirked at him. “I’ve known you to cause greater damage in less time than that.” 

Newt rolled his eyes and fell quiet, apparently distracted again. His leg vibrated under the table, all nervous energy, as though he just couldn’t wait to get back out there. Hermann looked towards the plastic window of the tent, allowing himself to get drawn back in just the same. 

The Analyst was gone. The tree he’d been staring at, now wrapped by a towering curl of blue tinted flowers, remained. It was difficult to discern details among the leaves and flowers. Everything blended together, overlapping with very little sense of depth. But the definition was there, and in it, or rather within it, an odd cluster that Hermann strongly suspected belonged once to a human body, boxed in an even odder square shape. 

The tree, Hermann thought, was original. It had the height and feel of something old, that had been there Before. There wasn’t much of a reason for Trespasser to come out this far into the suburbs, especially not now that they knew the point of it was to take out the highly populated areas. Where they were camped was just one of his steps, maybe the swipe of a tail on his way to the bigger buildings. The house itself was more likely taken out by a bomb. Collateral damage. 

But by chance the tree had been spared, and in it, a treehouse. Four walls and a roof, now eaten away by the Blue effect and replaced by something else. A familiar sight, and one that he only recognized it as such because he was looking for meaning in the shape. He looked past it, out into the distance where the taller buildings were still standing skeletal against the dimming sky. It should have been beautiful. To Newt, it probably was. But they were in the graveyard of someone’s home, making sense of the familiar turned strange, and Hermann hated it. 

It had felt wrong to him before, years ago, how the mundane aspects of life, like classes, and lunch breaks, and traffic, could exist among and in tandem with the chaos of the Kaiju. This was that again, but slower, and closer. He looked away, and realized Newt had been watching him. 

“What?” 

His eyebrows shot up. “Nothing. I mean, I’ve only been talking to you for like, ten minutes while you sat like a lump, but-” 

Hermann tipped his chin up. “I tuned you out.” 

“Sure thing,” Newt said, but he didn’t look away, pinning Hermann in place. “You’ve been spacing out a lot.” 

“You drive me to distraction,” he replied, and then winced, since that was just fodder for Newt’s depravity, but he didn’t take the bait. 

“Maybe they're hypnotizing us,” Newt whispered, not at all quietly enough. At the next table, the Soldier they’d brought with them glanced up, and then tried to hide his smirk with the cigarette he held. 

Hermann rolled his eyes. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“They think we’re weird.”

“They’re likely correct.” 

“Do you think…” Newt trailed off, staring now at what Hermann assumed was nothing, and Hermann was tempted to let him, not sure he wanted to know anything Newt had to say in that tone. Not here. 

He straightened his back and turned his attention to his food. “I think all the time, thank you.” 

Newt glanced back at him, meeting his eyes, and for a moment he was so visibly disappointed it hit Hermann like a punch to the chest, knocking the wind from him. Newt shifted in his seat and pulled his foot back, breaking their contact. But then he rolled his eyes. Made more jokes. 

They bickered, pretending like they were back at the Shatterdome. But the question had caught at the edges of Hermann’s mind, and he began, quietly, to worry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, next update coming soon (hopefully). paradiamond.tumblr.com for more nonsense~
> 
> Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/user/rmhdgdn4k2iw88ghuh9eyb9wt/playlist/6QYZCL442KrONLoFL1gbgH


	2. Invasion 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.” Annihilation, ch. 2, p. 86.

How Newt managed to completely clutter up his work area after only three days in a temporary, transitory lab was beyond Hermann. Clearly, he needed to lower his expectations ever further than they already sat. Mumbling to himself, he shoved what seemed to be random papers back into a box before moving on to the next bunch. It was ridiculous, cleaning up after him like this, as though he was Newt’s assistant, or worse, a graduate student, but the lamp on his side had gone out again and they had been told in no uncertain terms when they arrived that they should expect at all times to pack up and leave on a moment’s notice, and Hermann didn’t intend to listen to Newt’s whining if they ruined any of his work. 

When he and Newton first received this assignment, they had just gotten back from their most recent posting in Hong Kong, which was still awash with fresh samples. Of course, Newt was initially very upset about this transition away from all that disgusting, fresh contamination, until he realized how interesting the long term impacts of the Blue were from a biological perspective. At the moment he was out on an expedition, as he called it, which to Hermann’s understanding just meant he was walking around outside and looking at things. The last time, unfortunately, he also brought back samples. Frogs, plants, water, and other viscera from the great outdoors. Hermann stuck to his own science and was happier for it. Not to mention cleaner. 

He continued to tidy the table, slowly freeing it from under the weight of the mess. For the most part, he found field drawings. Newt was a good artist. Uncomfortably so, in this case. Hermann didn’t like looking at the hyper realistic images of frogs, fish, and turtles. They were unsettling in their detail, the look in their eyes too astute, as though Newt had projected his own feelings and intelligence onto them while simultaneously bringing them to life. Hermann traced a thumb over the slight protruding ridge on the third turtle’s forehead, smudging it, before gathering it up with all the rest to stuff back in the folder where they all belonged. 

There was also a copy of the map, which Hermann avoided looking at entirely. 

Just as Hermann found himself beginning to feel satisfied with the state of the surface, the lights flickered, and then all came back on at once. Pleased, he turned around, ready to get back to work at a table with a functioning lamp, and jumped, so startled that he both hurt and embarrassed himself. It was only luck that he didn’t drop his cane as well. His hand flew to his hip, but he kept his teeth ground together. 

The young Soldier they’d brought with them had entered while Hermann was distracted, apparently, and the intrusion made Hermann stiffen, his muscles further locking down as if in protest. “Can I help you?”

The Soldier looked him up and down. “I’m guarding camp,” he all but drawled with some strange, unidentifiable accent, and shifted his weight, posture utterly unconcerned. It stood out in contrast to the professional grip he had on his rather large weapon. “Right now that means you.” 

Hermann narrowed his eyes at him, taking the measure of the man for the first time. He looked young, much younger than Hermann at the very least, except for his eyes. Regardless, he didn’t seem to be taking the job particularly seriously. Hermann looked away. Like it or not, he wasn’t in charge. “Very well, just don’t touch anything.” 

That clearly amused him, though he didn’t respond except to incline his head. 

Still annoyed, Hermann stalked over to his side of the tent, his cane catching somewhat on the plastic floor, determined to ignore him. He sat down and pulled the ever growing stack of notebooks towards himself, flipping the top one open. It contained pages upon pages of data, for the most part cataloging radiation levels. The Zone should be flooded with it, since the army ultimately took Trespasser down with a nuclear warhead less than twenty miles away, but it wasn’t. Just like Manilla. Yet another mystery, and the one Hermann had specifically set out to solve. 

There was no reason to think that the Blue or any other aspect of the attack should impact radiation in such as way. In fact, they had destroyed the quantum structure of the Breach with an atomic bomb. But energy fluctuations not completely dissimilar, though not altogether similar either, to the ones found in and around the tear between the two worlds had been picked up within the Zone area had led the leaders at the PPDC headquarters to suspect that something potentially alien was still occurring that could explain the change. Hence Hermann, the world’s leading expert on such things, living and working in a tent. 

Bothered as he was by the circumstances, Hermann couldn't deny that the potential applications were staggering. If they could unlock the secret behind the radiation drop, they could apply it to other locations, repair nuclear fallout zones, develop new technologies. Change the very field of radiology. Hermann made a note in his book, and bit back a smirk. He couldn't deny a stab of pleasure at the thought that while Newt was fiddling around with plants, which was fine, they should know the long term ecological impacts of this sort of thing, Hermann himself might be on the way to decoding the subatomic structure of radiation. 

The light flickered again, and Hermann glared at it. Of course, he had to get the data first, and sub-par machinery was not helping. 

“Frustrated?” 

Thankfully, this time he didn’t jump. Instead, Hermann glanced over his shoulder. He had almost forgotten his visitor, but the Soldier still stood there, not smirking or even sneering. He didn’t even seem to be watching Hermann work. He was simply standing, gun at half mast, black box at his hip, boots, radio. Hermann sniffed. It was already hard to focus without Newt’s constant noise to fight against, he didn't need this as well. “I am working. It is simply more difficult than it usually is without the proper materials.” 

That got him a twitch of the lips. But that was all. “I know what you mean,” the Soldier said, and tapped the gun, which was a simple rifle, non-automatic. Hermann hadn’t noticed before. 

He looked away, determined to focus. “Yes, well.” 

“Good reason for it.” 

This time, he bit his tongue. At first. “Not that you’ll tell me.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Hermann saw him shrug. “Things go missing.”

Frowning, Hermann turned in his seat. “Thieves? Here? They said it was about contamination.”

There was an odd sort of look in his eye, one that Hermann didn’t quite recognize. “Isn’t that what I just said?” 

Hermann blinked. “I suppose,” he lied, trying to hide his irritation and stop the conversation as soon as possible. Part of it was the situation itself, but most of it was how the man reminded him of their first mission, to the Bone Slums in Hong Kong. 

A not inconsiderable amount of Kaiju Blue had been spilled the day of the final Kaiju attacks, most of it all over the heavily populated areas of the city. A small price to pay, perhaps, all things considered, and a rather large source of scientific curiosity. 

He and Newt had been pulled for the mission just after the last funeral, and at the time Hermann had been glad to be busy, to still have a job, an excuse to still be with Newt without having to make a decision about it. The aftereffects of their Drift had been strong, especially then, and they were never apart for long. The day they left, Newt, idiot that he was, burned his hand on a coffee maker, and Hermann felt it all the way in his room. Everything was amplified, made more present. They moved together, stayed together, and so they went to Hong Kong together. 

One interesting result of the Hong Kong government’s policy of not evacuating the city as a matter of course, in no small part due to political tensions with China on the subject of governance, was that the city had sustained multiple attacks, and therefore overlapping Kaiju Blue incidents. Six attacks in twelve years, though most of them failed to make land. However, some did, and the evidence remained. In particular, Newt and Hermann were sent to investigate the impact of the Blue from Leatherback and Otachi on the materials leftover from previous attacks. It seemed to have no effect at all, other than the expected. The interesting, and disconcerting, aspect was the people. 

The cult there was hard to root out, even, and perhaps especially, after the Kaiju were dead, the tear between worlds closed. Hermann moved through the temple, held in the very skull of Reckoner, and felt eyes on him with every step. Newt felt it too, Hermann knew. He saw him shiver. They believed that they made it happen. They wanted magic and meaning and they brought them crashing down. Gods on Earth. 

So Hermann and Newt walked under the eyes of hundreds, the link between them still fresh and humming, amplifying the sensation. A great weight. 

“You closed the gate, right?” 

Gate. Hermann’s mind caught on the word, since it wasn’t quite right. “I helped.” 

“Huh. So, that’s that.” 

“Perhaps,” Hermann responded, and then immediately regretted the encouragement. Clearly, the man didn’t know what he was talking about. He wished to return to his theorizing, to the numbers and figures that still gave him the same sense of laying on his back, looking up at the stars through a narrow hole cut in the wooden box, alone and cradled by the very world. 

“Do you think they'll just give up?” The Soldier shook his head, preoccupied with digging around in his pocket. “I don't.” 

He wasn’t alone in that, of course. Hermann wasn’t entirely sure why he seemed to think he was. The Shatterdome program had yet to be closed, and likely wouldn't be for some time, not until the last of their generation, the one that lived through it all, was long dead. 

“Yeah.” The Soldier found what he was looking for, lit a cigarette, and raised it up to his lips all in one seamless motion. “They came at us with something big, and we built big things to beat them. Maybe they learned our way. That's what I would do.” He took another drag, staring out at nothing. “That's what you do in war.” 

Hermann shifted his weight on the stool and tried not to look at him or fidget, a new urge he seemed to have picked up from Newt, who was right at this moment galavanting all over the malformed countryside, shading his hand over his eyes, considering a plant formation and all without a care for Hermann being stuck dealing with this nonsense. 

He tugged at his collar. The atmosphere in the tent was uncomfortable, both metaphorically and literally. California in the summer was hot, and dry, and this particular part of California had the added detriment of being riddled with ozone layer holes, making the entire effect even worse. Much had been done to patch such holes in recent years, but not here, not where they had so little data on the potential impacts. It was yet another part of why they were there in the first place, why they’d been sent to four different Blue Zones in as many months. The world needed information, and as the reigning experts in K-science, Hermann and Newt were best suited to provide it. 

“You been to war?”

Hermann suppressed the urge to sigh, but it rubbed him the wrong way. “I’ll have you-”

“Not Kaiju war. Real war.” His eyes dropped down, to Hermann’s hips. His leg. 

Hermann straightened his back. “There are some who believe that ‘real war’ as you call it, is over.”

The Soldier snorted around his cigarette, then lowered so he could speak again. “Yeah, and there be some who think the world is flat, but that ain't true either, is it?”

More of what Hermann suspected was his real accent was coming through, and he grasped at it, determined to make the man uncomfortable right back. “I take it you’re from New York.”

“Brooklyn.” He raised his hand and inhaled deeply, then let the smoke out through his nose. “I was never supposed to be here, or over there.” 

Hermann cut him a glance. Surely he was too young to have fought in the Iraq war. Hermann didn’t know, and worse, once again he wasn’t sure what to say. All at once he experienced such a stab of annoyance at Newt’s absence it would have rocked him back on his feet if he’d been standing. He again imagined Newt out there, in the not-buildings and wreckages, haplessly collecting his samples as if Hermann didn’t need him. 

“You been out there yet?”

This time, Hermann didn't move, but the Soldier nodded like he had. “You should. You should see it.”

Hermann could point out that this was all ‘out there’, that thinking about an arbitrary camp as a place distinct from the Blue Zone was a mistake. More artificial walls, more maps that hid more than they showed. But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything as the Soldier ground the cigarette into the floor of the tent and walked out. 

***

Unsurprisingly, Newt came back from his latest expedition with a plexiglass tank full of all manner of disgusting creatures to take apart and examine. 

“Hermann! You missed out on some crazy stuff man, I saw these aquatic reptiles-”

“Why on earth would you bring even more mess into this tent when you know we’re going to be moving on tomorrow?” He groused, all but jumping to his feet to jab the edge of the tank with his cane. 

Newt’s head snapped up and Hermann didn’t need to see the look on his face to know he hadn’t thought of that at all. “Uh, well anyway, I’m hoping to figure out what’s going on with this crossbreeding, because let me tell you, it is not normal for an arroyo toad to be making it with an anaxyrus.” He stuck his hand into the tank and pulled out a very large, ugly toad, brandishing it like a weapon. Hermann had to push down the urge to lean away. “They don’t even usually live here!” 

Not for the first time, Hermann allowed himself to wonder what had led him to this point, in this place, in this beige outfit. Then he let it go and turned back to his work space, which was growing increasingly chaotic, stacked high with piles of the notebooks. He’d had the one lab assistant they’d been given copying data from the tools they’d been allowed in order to clear their, very rudimentary, memory banks for the next location. 

“I know I’ve said this before but the biodiversity in this place is outstanding-” 

Hermann sighed and looked up again, resigned to tempering one of his partner’s more manic moods. “Newt…” Any annoyed affection he felt trailed off when he caught sight, not of the chaos Newt had wrought in only a few minutes, but more so the focus of it. 

The table had been haphazardly covered with one of the many plastic sheets they’d been issued, hiding the remaining papers and maps and tape recorders. It had clearly been thrown in a rush, a testament to Newt’s boundless enthusiasm, and some of the papers stuck out at the back, as though crawling out from under the barrier. Newt was looming over it all, brandishing a scalpel over his now deceased toad victim, a headlamp shining down on the carnage. 

Hermann looked away, discomforted, but he couldn’t stop the panic from clawing its way up his throat when he saw Newt bend down out of the corner of his eye, a perfect pantomime of what he saw for years in their lab in Hong Kong. Overlapping images clouded his mind. The bioluminescence. The ridges. He had the sudden urge to tell Newt to take care, to be careful with himself. What actually came out in the form of a snap was, “Don’t try drifting with it this time.” 

Newt jerked up, wide eyed, the scalpel still held in his hand. But it dripped red, not blue. “What?” 

It took Hermann a moment to think through what he said enough to understand the shock. He thought he had seen something Blue and at least formally alive and immediately thought of it as a Kaiju. He hesitated. That alone shouldn’t shock Newt that much. It was a simple mistake, one that shouldn’t cause Newt to stare like this. “I- nothing. A bit a deja-vu.” 

Newt put his hands on his hips, which was ridiculous and ineffective at the best of times and doubly so in the outfit he was wearing, and frowned, though Hermann was looking down and didn’t see it. “You’re still getting that?” 

Hermann suppressed a flinch. “No.” 

“Uh huh,” Newt said, as though those were real words, and turned back to his table. “You can’t fool me, everyone else, maybe, but-” 

“Newton please be quiet, I’m trying to work.” 

It grew momentarily quiet, which was a bad sign, and then Newt set the scalpel down, which was worse. Hermann didn’t really want to be the object of his focus, not right now. Newt looked at him head-on, his head lamp directed right at Hermann’s face. “On what, the radiation thing?” 

“Turn that light off.” Hermann glared, tightening his grip on the pen until his instruction was followed. “And yes, the radiation thing, or as another person might call it, an important scientific discovery.” 

“Well, technically,” Newt threw part of the toad in the direction of the tank, spraying fluid onto the floor of the tent. “You didn’t discover it.” 

“You-”

“You didn’t!” He waved his arms. “They discovered it, which is why they let us in here in the first place! You’re going to understand it, though, which is my point. It’s more important.” 

Hermann eyed him, suspicious. Newt stared back, in his glasses and his foolish tan apron, expression open. When no more was forthcoming, he relaxed, somewhat. “Yes, well. That’s true.” 

Newt smiled. “Probably not here though, with those books.” 

“Don’t remind me,” Hermann groaned, too irritated to remember to smile back. 

Newt laughed, loudly, and put his hands up. “Hey, I feel your pain.” 

“Do you,” Hermann said, turning his attention back to his work. Most of the pages of the thinnest notebook were blank, since it was where he worked on problems. Hermann had done the few existing calculations out of boredom, since, as expected, the readings he was getting were picking up puzzles bigger than the eco-friendly, waterproof books could easily handle. 

Given enough time, he could surely do them all himself, by hand, but it seemed like a waste when there were perfectly good supercomputers waiting for him in proper, climate controlled labs in civilized places like the Iowa State physics department and the labs of the University of Johannesburg, both of which had made him some excellent offers. But that was after. 

Newt had been quiet for longer than a minute. He glanced back up. “Do you really?” 

The grin Newt shot him was all teeth. “More or less.” 

At that, Hermann relaxed, and they turned back to their respective stations in relative peace, if not quiet. The toad still made quite a bit of wet noise in its dismantling and Newt always, always, talked under his breath. But it was that new, understanding space they had found after the Drift, starting in the early hours of the morning, after the party to celebrate the end of the end of the world. It had been missing, for the most part, since they’d arrived here, but that was predominantly due to Newt’s excitement. 

The Blue Zone, Hermann knew, was Newt’s personal playground. As long as it wasn’t outwardly dangerous, and so far nothing had turned up worse than some particularly territorial foxes, then it was interesting, and therefore fun. Simple. Hermann wanted to hate him for it, but the truth was he saw his work in a similar way, despite his current frustrations. What they found in Manilla was extraordinary, and now he was kept from fully exploring it here, where it would be the most potent, for fear of contamination? As excuses went it was a strange one, especially if the answer, as the Soldier clearly wanted him to believe, was common theft. 

It was another question. Another riddle. As far as he knew they hadn’t seen any signs of other people out there. Newt would have mentioned it, as he mentioned everything. He told Hermann when he saw an out of season bird with an unusual crest, for God’s sake. Hermann avoided nature as a matter of course, always feeling that for every answer it offered up, there was another one waiting. Fibonacci sequences in flowers, and all that. It all held little appeal for him. 

What Hermann felt most of all under the open sky and the trees and the in the wind was that all was not as it seemed, and he had to push back against that tratorous feeling before it overtook his objectivity. 

When they first arrived, Hermann hadn’t pushed hard enough. He hadn’t been ready. The San Francisco Exclusion Zone had been left to the wild in a way the others hadn’t been, a testament to both the sheer size of America that they could afford to leave land like that, for Sacramento at the very least likely could have been recolonized, and to the feeling of sheer dread that Trespasser had inspired. 

By the end of the war, any one of the Jaegers could have easily taken Trespasser, a mere category one. He was slow, relatively speaking, and unbalanced. He had no special abilities that they saw, only brute strength. But being the very first made him utterly terrifying. The world had never experienced fear of that kind before. He changed the very nature of the land for them, and then suddenly Hermann was riding on it, bouncing in an uncomfortable jeep with a group of strangers. It felt vaguely wrong to be there, though he didn’t dwell on that part. It had felt wrong to write code for giant machines that were frying the brains of brave young men, but he did that too, and was right to do it. This would be the same. 

Hermann slid off the stool to start putting notebooks in boxes. He could wait for his erstwhile assistant to come and do it, but not if he wanted it done correctly. “Have you eaten?” he called out, and realized that Newt had maintained true silence for the past several minutes at least. 

The toad was in pieces and Newt was staring down at it, a pencil halfway to his mouth, frozen there in the process of thought. One of the waterproof notebooks sat open on his lap, the erasure burns scored deep. After a long moment, he looked up, as if just registering the sound by the time Hermann was almost upon him. “What?” 

“Food.” Hermann set a hand on the back of his chair, both endeered and annoyed. “Have you eaten?” 

“Oh, no,” Newt looked back down, apparently done with talking. When it was convenient for him, he could do it. 

Hermann glared at his profile. The sort of familiarity they had was a instrument sharpened at two ends, useful at times and at others threatening to prick them both. Neither of them were good at balance, or tact, or sincerity. The Blue Zone might be his playground, but Newt had spent most of his childhood alone, and it showed. 

It was different the night they won. They had spent the celebration dancing around each other, marking their location with glances, confirming what they already knew. Hermann could feel where Newt was, wherever he was. When Hermann left, Newt followed. They went not to their rooms, but to the lab, which was a disaster zone. Even Newt seemed shocked by it, and nudged a piece of equipment with his foot. Hermann couldn't remember when it had been knocked over. Possibly when he rushed in, when he saw Newt prone on the floor. He turned away and busied himself with his desk. 

“You were right.” 

Hermann glanced back and was momentarily filled with panic that Newt was gone, he had faded away, but then he found him again, standing before the chalkboard, hands on his hips. He was little drunk, but then they both were. 

“Was I?” He couldn't help the sarcasm, some residual fear creeping back up. He hadn't been right, not at all, not where it mattered. It was Newt’s theory all along that saved them. 

Newt turned on his heels, and of all things, glared at him. “Uh, yeah dude. You were right about all this, the double event, the triple.”

“Technically,” Hermann conceded. It seemed a night for firsts. “I was right to the extent that...that I could see. All of my conclusions were correct, I simply made a bad assumption from that right information.” 

He should have listened to Newt, followed where he led. But of course he didn’t say that. 

Newt drifted closer. “Well maybe that's your problem. Limiting yourself.” His face suddenly split open in a grin, verging on manic. “We should have been working together from the start!”

Hermann stared, aware that he should do something, make some kind of response. It felt like his mind took up his entire self, leaving nothing left over for other processes, expressions, movements. He just couldn't imagine it. Helping Newt build the neural bridge, sneaking around, no. Of course, that wasn't what it would have been. It would have been carefully constructed arguments, proposals drawn up, lab conditions, and the two of them together. Still then it was too much of a stretch. In all likelihood, they were always going to be standing here. 

He leaned away, suddenly unsure, and Newt took another step forward.

It was his nervousness that finally broke though. Hermann saw Newt fidgeting, glancing down at his mouth. He could have moved away, but he didn’t, and Newt put his hands on his face and kissed him. 

It was such an odd memory, and so strange that Newt would ever not press an issue after the fact, that Hermann wasn’t sure if he imagined it or not. But he could still feel it, Newt’s hands on his face, his thumbs catching on his jaw, his lips against his own. He saw it too, sometimes, when he looked at Newt from a certain angle, when he caught Newt looking at him. But he’d never done it again, and Hermann was left to wonder why. 

Still, an uncomfortable knowledge sat between them, taking up all the empty space in the tent. A part of Newt echoed in his head, but only a part, cut off from the main body which was still walking around, growing and changing in front of his eyes. And if that was true then Newt had a piece of him, another Hermann, just the same way. The only way to know was to ask, to move forward with it. 

He played with the back of Newt’s chair, picking at the cheap plastic. Nervous. He made himself stop. “Do I think what?”

Newt kept his eyes down, back to slowly tearing apart the former toad. But he didn’t pretend not to understand the reference to his words from before, when they’d just gotten to camp. “Eh- it was nothing.” 

“It did not seem like nothing.” They were so close, possibly too close. It Newt lifted his arm, his elbow would hit Hermann in the center of his chest. Hermann could take a step back, but he didn’t. In any case, Newt didn’t seem to notice, preoccupied as he was with other things. 

A line appeared between Newt’s eyebrows, one that Hermann was well familiar with. “Yeah, alright. It’s just...I don’t want to freak you out, or anything. And I don’t need to be dragged down for a psych eval. I was just going to ask if you think I've changed.”

Hermann frowned. “What do you mean?” 

“I just-” Newt bit his lip, another nervous habit, and let go of the toad in favor of setting his hands against the table, gripping the edge. “I feel different. I know I said some shit on that tape I shouldn't have, and that was shitty of me, you know, back in the lab when I did the first Drift, but I really do feel like I died. Just, sometimes.” 

Every part of Hermann went cold, then hot. He let go of the chair like he’d been burned, and Newt finally turned to look at him, his eyes especially wide under his glasses. Hermann wanted to hit him. “Don't say that.”

Newt shook his head and lifted up both of his hands to drag through his hair, making it stick up in all directions. “Maybe that’s not the right- I feel like I...stopped, like when I woke up I was a different person.” 

Bile crawled up his throat. Of all the things for him to have _said_. Hermann’s outrage and anger was a physical force inside of him, pounding his heart, sending his blood racing. Newt always knew, he always said the worst possible thing, the type thing to make Hermann back up, turn, and storm away, to escape, getting out. 

Only this time, they weren’t in a lab or a university, they were in uncharted territory, and Hermann was headed straight into the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> paradiamond.tumblr.com for more nonsense~
> 
> Playlist: https://playmoss.com/en/paradiamond/playlist/invasion


	3. INVENTION

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.” Annihilation, ch. 2, p. 58.

“A family emergency,” Newt’s tone was mocking. “A family emergency!” 

Hermann flinched, but didn’t chastise him. To his credit, Newt had managed to be quiet until they were mostly out of hearing distance of the others setting up their new camp. Most importantly the Specialist, whom they certainly should not offend and had also been the one to give them the news of the young Soldier’s abrupt departure. 

When they woke up, things were different. There was an obvious reason for it, considering how they spent the night, but for some reason Hermann didn’t feel like that was all. Now Hermann knew why, and after what they saw, whatever it was, he knew it could have been worse. He hadn’t needed to look at Newt to know that he thought the Specialist was lying, even though there was no reason for that, and now he was out here, all but yelling about it. 

“Keep your voice down,” Hermann said through his teeth, thinking of animals with too astute eyes and perfectly uninterrupted abilities to hunt and kill. The space in between Sacramento and Oakland was more wild than the city, both because it was a transitional zone to begin with, and due to the fact that Trespasser had doubled back over it, more impacted by his injuries. The weapons they’d brought actually made sense here. Already they had seen more animals, more eyes in the dark. Hermann didn’t even want to think about what Oakland itself would be like, being where Trespasser died. 

Newt whirled on him. “Why? Am I starting to make sense about the army guys? They're up to something.”

It wasn't what Hermann meant, but he let it go in favor of moving on to a more important point. He lifted his cane to jab in Newt’s general direction. “What does it matter if you never take anything I say into consideration?”

“What?” Newt’s voice was a laugh that time, and he looked at Hermann with wide eyes. The air between them felt thick. Since they’d drifted there was a shift in the space between them, but there hadn’t been a step. Not like that, not until last night. 

“Are you kidding? You must be.” Hermann looked away, embarrassed, and Newt made a satisfied sound, turning away with his hands on his hips, as if surveying the land. “Yeah. I’m just saying, they're keeping things from us.” 

“It is a military operation, we’re not entitled to-”

“Yeah and why is that?” Newt whirled back around, his face pinched, screwed up as though the act of asking was the first time the question had occurred to him. 

Hermann frowned, hot, uncomfortable, and now, confused. “Why is what?”

“Why is this still a military operation? The Kaiju are gone. We’re not fighting anymore.”

Hermann blinked. It was disturbingly close to some of what the Soldier had said, before he left. And after what they saw in the woods, Hermann didn’t know how to answer. He paused, probably for too long, and by the time he opened his mouth to respond, Newt was already looking away, off in the direction of the Pacific. 

Hermann glared and then turned his face pointedly on the other direction, back from where they’d come from, back to Sacramento. In the space around them, camp was being constructed, which only served to reinforce the notion that it was all like that, just a construction, easily torn down. Hermann twisted his hand on his cane. Eventually, they would have to deal with what they saw, because Hermann knew they saw something out there. 

As soon as he made it through the tent flap, he had heard Newt gaining ground behind him. The strange thing, the thing he would notice later, looking back, was that the Soldier didn’t follow. Maybe he was already gone, but none of the others did either. They just let them both go, out into the darkness, going deeper into the shell of the city. 

It was an odd memory for him already, though Hermann had plenty of those, and not all originated with him. The wind in his face, dodging debris covered on moss, heart pounding. The darkness was almost complete, but he could feel Newt behind him, could feel exactly where he was, and he pushed harder, following a path he didn’t understand, as if making for the center of a maze. 

Escape wasn't an urge Hermann usually indulged in. But that had been no indulgence, it was a survival instinct, much as Newt was likely following the urge to chase, and catch. 

“Hermann! God, stop!” Newt all but screamed and grabbed Hermann by the arm, wrenching him around to face him. “What the hell?” 

“Me!” Hermann rounded on him, using what little height he had to its fullest advantage. He raised both arms to push Newt in the chest, suddenly determined to move him, to make him feel this too. “Me? What on earth-” 

“You’re the who one-” 

“How dare-” 

A low sound, or something like it, rumbled between them. A growl, or an energy surge. An electric hum. Both of them froze, some primal drive kicking in. Adrenaline for sharpened senses, a lack of fear, briefly heightened reflexes. Then logic reasserted itself. 

Hermann blinked, trying to see through the low light of the moon, and realized several things all at once. He reached for Newt, blindly, and caught his shoulder. “We need to go back, we shouldn’t be here.” 

Newt gaped at him. “Yeah, no kidding-”

The noise again. Hermann started walking, still caught in Newt’s grasp and now pulling him along, his neck craned back to watch as they moved, and saw something. Or felt it. Dark blue, deep and barely visible. A pattern in the moss, a pattern made of the moss overlaid on the asphalt? In his mind, he could see it so clearly, could draw it on the map if he needed to. 

“Holy shit!” Newt was already jumping back as the words left his mouth, pulling Hermann off balance enough to fall. He hit the ground hard, dazed, and barely felt Newt pulling him up by the shock he felt at what he saw, what he wouldn't have noticed, low to the ground that it was, if he hadn’t landed inches from it. 

Hermann scrambled back, his left hand on the ground to push himself up, getting tangled with Newt’s efforts to pull him. His right he extended out on some instinct, driven to keep danger away. “Look.” 

Newt, half bent over and half standing, his knees bent, back bowed, did. He froze. “What the-” Then he howled, because Hermann had gotten his legs underneath himself and had bashed the top of his head into Newt’s chin as he stood, his eyes still fixed on the strangeness of the thing in front of them, scrambling to get away. 

“What- what is that?” 

“God Hermann- I think you broke-”

Hermann grabbed him, hard, right under the elbow, and pulled him back. “What. Is that?” 

Newt looked again. He didn’t stop looking, which made sense as the creature itself seemed to make none, at least to a layman's eyes. A beaked fish, or a frog not quite transformed from its tadpole stage, but large like a toad. Hermann expected him to say something like, ‘it’s the weird bird I was talking about, looks like it got hurt’ or, ‘this is a californian frog monster, master of camouflage, that’s why it looks like that.’ But what he actually said was, “Shit, I don’t think have a camera.” 

Irrationally, Hermann felt betrayed by this. “That’s not what I-” The thing on the ground cut him off with a sound, not _the_ sound, from before, but a sort of moan. They both leaned back automatically, giving it space, Newt’s hand still scrambling at his waist. 

“It must be some kind of mutation, that’s so-” 

Then they heard another sound, and this time it was the sound, again, still, and they heard it as one. Hermann whirled around, his heart clawing its way up his throat, and saw a shadow move in the dark. But he shouldn't be able to see a shadow. Panicked, Hermann turned back, desperate suddenly not to be alone, and found Newt not taking pictures, or screaming, or moving at all, but glaring down at the black box hooked to his waist. 

“Newt!” Hermann barked, and Newt’s neck snapped up so quickly he heard the sound of bone on bone. “Move!” 

It was enough. They ran, back and back over the deep shimmering blue of old asphalt until they hit camp. It was jarring, stepping into the light after being in the dark, not the least because it seemed impossible that the Specialist could be sitting there, reading, while shadows walked around by themselves in the ruined city. Which likely meant that they didn’t. Fear and stimulus. But unexplained, _mutated_ , creatures did crawl on the ground. They’d both seen that. 

For a long moment, they just stood there, still and quiet. The darkness seemed heavy around them. A physical force, like an invisible gas, blanketing the area. There was nothing for it. Hermann went back to the tent, the working tent, not the sleeping one, and Newt followed. It seemed more or less like the right thing to do, and they both went to their respective stations. 

“You should check and see if that, uh, sound registered on your instruments.” 

Hermann hummed and went to do just that, one foot in front of the other. His heart was still pounding, but then, he didn’t usually run. 

“I’ve been finding increased amounts of silicone in the water and soil.” 

Hermann didn’t turn. There was nothing on the instruments. “Oh?” 

“Yeah,” Newt’s tone could wither plants. “Haven’t found in living organisms though.” 

A word sat between them, terrible and alive. Like the thing they saw, or thought they saw, or misunderstood in the dark and in the wake of adrenaline and anger. Silicone was one of the primary component parts of Kaiju Blue. 

“Well,” Hermann said, now moving the boxes around without a purpose. “You’ll keep me informed.” 

“Sure,” Newt said. Hermann, now properly out of things to do, watched him pick up a beaker and move it five inches to the left. Then he put it back. Hermann fought the urge to jump up and take it from him. 

“Do stop fidgeting.” 

“You first.” 

He scoffed. “I don’t fidget.” 

When Newt didn’t roll his eyes or otherwise mock him, Hermann began to feel truly concerned, which fed into his deeply rooted fear from before, building the wave higher. That Newt would say he was different, that he had died, was-

Newt slammed his hand on the table, making Hermann jump. “The treehouse!” 

Hermann blinked. “Pardon?” 

Newt was looking at him now, finally, that old familiar spark in his eye. Eureka. Hermann had tried to slap him for saying it once. _You aren’t that Newton, Newton._ Hermann felt his head spin as Newt got close, the proximity crossing the wires in his head. 

“It was the treehouse. That’s what you were looking at when we were eating, yeah?” 

From before, the body in the tree, caged in a now altered shape. Of course Newt would wonder, would notice. He picked at everything until it fell apart. One of Hermann’s most powerful childhood memories, given over intentionally instead of shared in a whirlpool of minds, and he brought it up now. 

“Yes.” It hadn’t been what Hermann had been thinking about, but it was close. He didn’t want to bring up the body, didn’t want to call attention to another death, not now when Newt's hands were already shaking. Still shaking. 

Newt nodded and looked away, perching his hands on his beige-clad hips. Ridiculous. “It’s- I get it.” 

This was true, more or less. Newt was one of few who knew. Possibly the only, since his mother was gone and it was safe to assume his father hadn’t bothered to remember. 

“I know you do.” 

They stayed together late into the night, just like before. They went to bed. The next day they packed up, got in the jeeps, and were told that the Soldier had left them. 

The whole way, Hermann gripped his notebook tight, feeling the edge cut into the soft flesh of his palm as the jeep rattled down the path. It comforted him, the weight and reality of it. Inside, there were findings. Numbers, representation of things as they really were. But with them, a hint of doubt. There seemed to him more that he did not know than he understood. He was a physicist, dealing with the question of ‘why’ as Newt wrestled with ‘what.’ It was a comfortable, natural pattern. But without the context, without the foundation, it all seemed terribly ridiculous. Mocking. Without context, putting his faith into those numbers was foolish, bordering on willfully ignorant. And he wasn’t Newt, thrilling in the chase. 

Hermann was a physicist. And he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

***

“Ok,” Newt said, and held up yet another piece of paper Hermann didn’t much want to look at. “What about this?” 

Hermann narrowed his eyes at the next best guess of the image of the creature Newt had captured there. The desk around them was littered with similar drawings. All failed attempts to recreate the thing they’d seen in the night. “Once again, I fail to see-” 

“I’m not explaining it to you again, dude, come on. Better or worse?” 

Herman shot him a withering look but made himself focus, taking in the details of the thing. Hermann shied away from calling it an animal, even in his own head, because then he would have to focus on the ways it was not right. But he didn’t give it another name either. 

“This is pointless.” 

Newt slammed the drawing down. “I swear you’re trying to kill me. Why do you have to be like this all the time?” 

Hermann glared at him. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true, that Newton said things he didn't mean all the time. “Let’s try to look at this objectively, if you would.” 

Much to his annoyance, that made Newt laugh, as he always did, with his entire body. “Hermann, I hate it break it to you, but first of all, nothing out here, and by here I mean like, all of nature, is objective. It just doesn’t-” he waved a hand, getting distracted, sucked in by his own thoughts, a swirl of overlapping concepts and colors. Hermann tensed, waiting to see if he should step in and stop it, something he had done in the past, many times, but then Newt regrouped himself. 

“Even if you could take us, or anything, really, that was alive, and seal it up, take away all the stimuli, it _still_ wouldn’t be objective because it would still have itself.”

“Is that supposed to mean us or the creature?” 

“Both!” He turned and picked up the drawing. “All we can do is get close, which is what I’m trying to do here, if you would just help me. Ok? We need to put the pre-formed theories away as much as possible, and just get a picture to start. We need to know what we’re looking for.” 

Hermann regarded him over the paper now hanging in front of his face, caught by conflicting emotions of distaste and regard. As usual. Newton brought out...everything in him. The best, the worst. The night before, they were something else, as though they became something else, and now, back to this. It was dizzying, and no doubt partly his own fault. As frustrating as Newt was being about everything, always, Hermann knew he must always be worse. Instead of throwing out seemingly everything, every little thought, he said nothing. As he did now, prompting Newt to turn away in frustration, scribbling away at yet another sheet of paper. 

Hermann only felt minimally bad about it. There was something off, something pointless about the entire exercise. Attempting to draw the creature, it wouldn’t work. 

He cast his mind back, trying to clear it, to see it without interference. Impossible, perhaps, by Newt’s understanding of objectivity, but useful as an exercise all the same. Focus on the details, rule out the extraneous. When he fell...when he fell. 

“Newton.” 

“Uh, hello?” Newt didn’t look up. “I’m busy, actually trying to do-”

“What did you see?”

At that, Newt did raise his eyes, if not his body. “What? That’s what we’re trying to figure out dude.” 

“No, before that,” Hermann said, ignoring the discomfort that came with going down this road. “I saw the...creature because I fell. But I fell because you jumped back. You screamed, but you weren’t looking down. Did you see something?”

Newt stared at him for a long moment before he shook his head. “Well I- no. I thought I did but it wasn’t there when I looked back. I think I just imagined something in the dark because I was freaked out. You were acting like a crazy person.” 

Hermann glared. “I wasn’t the only one, you-”

“Let’s not get into this right now! How about this?” He held up yet another mangled drawing, this one even more fish-like than the last four, and not what Hermann saw. 

“No, and don’t avoid the subject.” 

“Uh- don’t tell me what to do, first of all, and second, I think we’ve hit the outer limit of what we can do here and we need to go back out in the field,” Newt said, all at once, already rummaging through boxes to produce all manner of devices and pieces of gear, including the map. The tent was already well on its way to being a disaster zone and they hadn’t been there five hours yet. 

Hermann watched him in silence for several seconds, his arms crossed, trying not to fidget, since it was not something he did. It occurred to him to argue, and to further confront him on the nature of the thing he thought he’d seen the night before, and to hit him with his cane, and to kiss him. Instead, he did nothing, because he didn’t want to go back out into the field, but it was undoubtedly the only right choice, scientifically speaking. 

His mind drifted back, as of often did, to when they first arrived. Outside the window of the jeep, the landscape had drifted by in one long flat image. They weren’t going particularly fast, as there was no need to. There were no other cars, no schedules other than their own, no people waiting for them in the crumbling cities. He still maintained a harsh grip on the seat, braced against the pain of the shaking of the vehicle. 

It had hurt, but Hermann remembered that he ignored it, focusing instead on the machine in his lap, measuring the amount of radiation. Still benign, even as close as they were getting to the drop zone. Amazing. 

He turned to say as much to the research assistant, since Newt was in the vehicle behind them with his biology equipment, and froze, a new awareness settling over him as they crossed the border between the before and the after. The space just outside the Blue Zone, where the military patrolled and checked them in, and the inside. He felt it, and looked up, some instinct driving him to check his surroundings, and saw the same sort of view that had been rolling past since they got in the jeep. Trees. A few moss covered houses, speckled in blue flowers. Buildings in various states of disarray in the near distance. But he knew it. 

“Did anyone else feel that?” he asked, driven as always to collect as much data as possible. 

“Uh,” his assistant shot a fearful glance at his leg. “Yes?” 

Hermann gave him a withering look. “I meant the energy fluctuation. Perhaps a vibration.” 

“Lots of those here, science man,” the driver drawled, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked like a scene from a bad movie. Hermann leaned back against the seat, annoyed, and took the rest of the ride in silence, confidant that he would be able to spot the change in the devices he had packed away. A change in energy, pressure, light. But there was nothing, so he never brought it up again. And he stayed inside, whenever possible. Apparently not today, not with creatures to be found. 

Newt slipped the map into his inside pocket in the lining of his shirt, for which Hermann was grateful. He didn’t like to be outside, and he liked looking at the map even less, since the first time he had seen it, Newt had drawn a red line Hermann would bet anything was where he had that feeling. 

“Ok, I think we’re-” Newt froze, his hands still comically pressed to his body, as if feeling for his keys. He let them drop and then turned to face Hermann, sending him a critical look. “Are you ok?” 

Hermann leaned back on instinct, unused to having the look directed at him. “What?”

“Does it hurt?”

Hermann frowned. “Does what…” he trailed off, realizing what Newt was getting at. 

“Your leg.” Newt’s eyes moved over him like a physical touch. “You hauled ass last night, and then we were in the car today. And you didn't- did you have your cane? Last night? I don’t...and you're not really using it now.”

Hermann blinked, surprised to find that he was right, at least partly. He was holding the cane, but he had just picked it up. It had been leaning against the table while Newt drew his pictures, and now it fit in his hand like a stranger, Iike a habit he just hadn't quite broken. It was a good way to hurt himself, playing the fool. He leaned on it, feeling immediately better. “Well it-” He paused. It didn't hurt. Not really. Newt was still staring. “I...don't know. No. Not really.”

A cold sort of discomfort came over him. From the look on Newt’s face, he had something of the same idea. There was also the issue of possibility. The lack of it. He pushed down with his foot, and felt a sharp pain run from his hip to his toes. That was normal. He straightened his back, and then immediately undid it. Also normal. The whole time, Newt stared. 

“It’s nothing, I’m sure.” 

After a long moment, Newt blinked. “You are?” 

Hermann didn’t have anything to say to that, so instead he looked away, out through the screen of the tent door. To the wild, where they were headed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is really late! I'm well aware. I got distracted working on original stuff, graduating, and trying to find a new place to live. But! The next chapter is fully written and the last two (Inversion) are most of the way there now. Thanks for sticking with it!
> 
> Playlist: https://playmoss.com/en/paradiamond/playlist/invention


	4. Invention 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.” Annihilation, ch. 2, p. 61.

The space between Sacramento and Oakland presented an odd mix of normalcy and oddity, and for Hermann it was difficult to determine which parts of the strangeness were due to the contamination and which were naturally occuring. They had stopped in a relatively uninhabited area, near something alarmingly called ‘Grizzly Island Wildlife Area’, only made remarkable now by the fact that Trespasser took the straightest possible route to Sacramento. It was an unfortunate turn of events for the populations of the various smaller towns in between the two giants, some of which, Hermann understood, had been completely wiped away. 

Their current campsite was at the site of a former railway museum, but for the life of him Hermann couldn’t see any evidence of it, not even as he and Newt made their way out into the field under the watchful eye of the Analyst, leaning against a tree. 

Hermann avoided looking at him as they passed. They hadn’t been forbidden from leaving camp, but it was clear that the prevailing feeling was that they shouldn't. Newt took to that about like anyone would expect, but for Hermann it was more complicated. To his mind, controls were good, for the most part. Control bred safety, security, and order. Newt only saw restraint. 

Under his breath, Newt had again pointed out that they were being kept in the dark, which was rather obvious, and that they were being watched, which wasn’t. 

“Paranoid.” 

“It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get me.” 

Hermann shot him a look. “Which they are not.” 

Newt just hummed, regarding the landscape with pointed, open interest. His ability to focus on more than one thing, such as field work and deliberately ignoring Hermann just to get back at him, was in this case, wasted, but Newt always had a tendency to waste most of his talents on things that didn’t matter, like music and bar games. It galled Hermann, to see a mind like his wasted, even a little bit, even just for a moment. Newt had never understood that. 

At least here, he applied himself. That was probably the best of it all. The Blue Zone was desolate and horrifying, but here the distractions were stripped away, and all that remained was their work. And Newt thrived. 

“What is that?” Newt asked, more to himself than anything else, but Hermann looked anyway. In the space between two small hills there was an odd box shape, so overgrown and out of place it took Hermann an eternity of looking to realize what they saw. 

“It’s one of the train cars.” 

Newt jerked his head around to stare at Hermann in fascination. “What train?” 

He rolled his eyes. “Once again-”

“I should read the memos, yeah. But I didn’t and now here we are.” 

They walked towards it, Hermann very carefully, mindful of the uneven ground and his cane, and then around to the other side to find it far less overgrown. The door was open, and it looked strangely inviting. A sliver of humanity immersed in nature with the words “Western Railway Museum” printed on the side. Hermann immediately found that he didn’t trust it. 

Newt stuck his head in, like an idiot who never studied biology or had a day of training in his life. Like someone incapable of seeing a train and not boarding it. The whole time, Hermann stood with his hand out, ready to pull him back if anything happened, if anything tried to yank him inside, but of course, nothing did. 

“Nope,” Newt leaned back out, visibly disappointed. “Nothing interesting. Trespasser must have kicked it here though, that’s pretty cool.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the map. Hermann took his turn looking into the car, and saw he was right, even by Newt’s rather intense standards of ‘interesting.’ It was just a box, obviously not used for fright, since it seemed to be more historic than functional. It was empty. Not even a nest, or an overgrown bush, though it seemed to have sunk into the ground somewhat over the years, since the wheels were nowhere to be seen. 

“Over there.” Newt pointed, and Hermann leaned back out to follow the line. The land gently dipped into what would have been a valley in a few million more years of change, but for now was simply a low outcropping of trees, settled where the water would gather. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it, which was part of what made it so strange. 

As they walked the short distance, Hermann reflected that in a very real way, it was just a summer day in California. A part of California no one had been to for a long time. The Blue had made it so they were both explorers and archeologists at the same time. The land had lasted through the destruction, and in all likelihood it would be there still when they were gone. 

They were both thinking about death. Hermann didn’t know how he knew. Death, regrets, change. Newt wanted to say something to him, and Hermann already felt it between them, had felt it for years. The connection that simmered under the surface of the letters they traded back and forth for years, that was real from the start. Compatibility. 

Meeting in real life had been like pouring gasoline of a fire. Working together was the center of their lives, the core of a star, holding them to the floor. Being here, in the wide open of the desolation, Hermann felt it all at once. Everything else was stripped away. 

They made it to the trees, and Hermann felt safer under the shade. Safer and bolder. “You know you aren’t dead.” 

“We probably shouldn’t talk, we could scare away the samples.” Newt had binoculars up against his glasses. Hermann wanted to hit him with them. But he was right. Technically. 

They moved quietly through the trees. Hermann waited him out, checking his black box, the geiger counter, and the compass. The insight he had gained into Newt’s mind had been revolutionary for times like this. Rather than push back, he disengaged. Took away what there was for Newt to pick and scratch at and left him to sort through his thoughts. When he had the patience for it, it was incredibly effective. 

Eventually, Newt huffed out a long breath and lowered them. “Yeah, I know.” 

“How nice for you,” Hermann ground out, growing emotional even though he had decided he wouldn’t. “You really must learn to think before you speak.”

“Why, so I can sound like you?” Newt threw back, and then visibly winced. They walked in silence for a few minutes more, moving to a different part of the shaded area. “I did think about it. Sometimes it's like all I can think about.” He stopped. “Do you feel different?”

Hermann stared at him. “I- we already discussed this.”

Bizarrely, that seemed to make Newt angrier than anything else. “What do you ask me questions, pick apart my mind, and you won't tell me anything?”

“I don't owe you anything.” 

Newt whirled on him. “What?” 

Hermann opened his mouth to respond, then snapped it shut, gesturing at a point over Newt’s left shoulder. There was a creature, a large insect, he supposed, though he didn’t know what kind, descending downwards on a delicate web. Newt froze, his training kicking in, and turned only his head. The insect continued on its path, a few feet behind him, unperturbed by the two giants staring at it. 

“Will that work?” Hermann whispered, feeling foolish. But less so when Newt only nodded, unclipping a heavy duty plastic bag from his belt. 

“Yeah,” Newt said, all focus. Hermann walked around to the other side as Newt held the bag just underneath the descending thing, ready to do...something. Hermann wasn’t sure what. None of his field work had involved this type of banality. Those thoughts vanished though, when the wind shifted and the insect landed on Newt’s bare hand rather than in the bag. 

For a moment, they both froze, as though hoping the wind would just turn around and fix the mistake, but then the thing skittered under the sleeve of Newt’s loose, durable shirt, and they sprang into action. 

“Oh my god!” 

“Hold still-” Hermann grabbed the bag out of Newt’s hand and then immediately got his hands tangled in the mess that was him attempting to unbutton Newt’s shirt while Newt simultaneously jerked it over his head, getting stuck half way up. “For the love of god man!” 

“What- Hermann!” 

“Sorry, sorry,” Hermann muttered, physically turning him around, searching for the bug. “Ah-” 

On instinct, he reached out to grab it, thankfully with the hand holding the plastic bag, so it ended up mostly encased in the material. A primal sort of horror clicked into place at the feel of it, and when it tried to jump, and Hermann squeezed without thinking, crushing it. The sound it made was disgusting, a cross between a crack and a squish, but the worst part was the liquid that came rushing out, cold and pale, and glowing blue. 

Hermann stared at the ground, at the pooling blood. He looked at it for so long that Newt had time to fix his shirt and sling the spare plastic bag over his whole hand, a pull the mess away from him. Perplexed, Hermann raised his eyes to his face. He seemed oddly calm. 

Newt shook it, to get the bag to settle in the other bag, the plastic not sliding down easily. “Great, that’s gross.” 

“Newton?” 

“Yeah?” He was clipping the bag back to his belt, now zipped closed. Hermann looked at it again, disturbed by his lack of response, and frowned. There was nothing blue inside the bag. 

“I-” He glanced down and saw the same was true of the ground. “Did you not see the Blue?” 

Newt frowned back at him. “Uh, no? I kind if had my shirt to deal with though, so maybe...” He frowned. “Huh.” 

“Yes?” 

“My back really itches.” 

Hermann’s eyebrows flew up, and in an instant he was tugging Newt towards himself, pulling up his shirt. His tattoos made it difficult to see if he was having any sort of reaction, and he told Newt as much, yelled it as they marched back out of the trees with their meager prize. 

They got back up the hill and Hermann made the split second choice to pull Newt back into the old train rather than try to get him back to camp. His breathing was even and his eyes were clear. Better to wash his skin first and see where that got them. 

They made quick work of Newt’s shirt, stripping it off smoothly and carelessly throwing it to the side. He wouldn't be putting it back on in any case. Newt was surprisingly corporative as Hermann doused him with the water from their canteens, getting the top layer off first before washing his hands, and then going in for a second round. 

As his smoothed his hands over Newt’s shoulders, his chest, his back, Hermann developed a single minded focus on the lines and colors, following their flow unconsciously. They reminded him of the outside, the trees, the hills. How one moved into the other. He followed curve of a clawed arm down the hook of his collarbone and onto his chest. He found himself fascinated, as though seeing them for the first time. 

“Hermann?” 

He looked up, the spell broken, directly into Newt’s eyes. A flush had spread, presumably from his chest, where it was kept a secret, up into neck and face, where it exposed itself. Honest. Hermann thought his own face was probably telling a similar story, though he felt no heat, just a cool sort of acceptance. 

“I-” Newt paused to swallow. “I think it’s probably fine.” 

“You don’t feel anything?” 

That only made Newt turn a deeper red, which fascinated Hermann to the point that he raised his hand to touch, but Newt caught it in the air. “What about you? You weren’t wearing gloves or anything?” 

The deflection caught Hermann by surprise, though it shouldn't have. They stared at each other in silence for a long moment, Newt feigning normalcy while Hermann found himself increasingly irritated. “Back to this, are we?” 

Newt blanched. “What?” 

“You can’t have it both ways,” Hermann said, his hand still caught in Newt’s. He could wrench it away, but he left it there instead, to make Newt chose. “You’re giving me a headache with the way you’re acting.” 

Newt had the gall to look offended. “Maybe I was trying to give you space!”

“Were you?” Hermann shot back, all childish rage and petty, comfortable, coolness. 

“I- sort of! There's a lot going on. You've been distracted too! Not to mention,” Newt dropped his voice, as through the trees and plants might be waiting just outside the open door to laugh at them. “I kissed you first, so the ball’s in your court dude, it's not always just going to be me, I mean come on!” His voice had risen back to his typical shrill tone and volume. 

Hermann stood there, oddly embarrassed. He wanted to throw it back, challenge him. Not last night, not last time. But that would require giving voice to what had happened between them in the dark of the tent, and he didn’t know if he wanted that. “If I need you to give me space I will inform you.” 

Newt scoffed. “No, you really won’t. I know you’re pissed at me but don’t lie to my face, please. You never ask for anything, you never talk! I talk and you respond, sometimes. How am I supposed to know? You haven't said anything about last night. I mean christ, you barely said anything during last night-”

“This isn’t the time or the place for this conversation,” Hermann said, coldly cutting him off. 

Newt sent him an incredulous look, still naked from the waist up. “Then why did you start it?” 

It was a compelling point, but Hermann would die before he admitted it. Instead, he grabbed the back of Newton’s neck, suddenly determined to kill two birds with one stone, and pulled him in for a savage, open mouthed kiss. Immediately, Newt’s hands slammed onto the sides of Hermann’s face, as though to keep him in place, as though he might pull away. Hermann pressed closer instead. 

Memories entwined with present sensation. He felt Newt shift his weight forward, bringing them closer to equal height, and Hermann leaned down more heavily on his cane, matching the set. All the while, Newt licked into his mouth, all technique left behind in his rabid enthusiasm, and it gave Hermann the heady sensation of being wanted without thought, without question. It tightened his chest, sending a shock of arousal down his spine when Newt bit his lip, and it made him dizzy. 

As soon as they broke away to breathe, Newt afixed himself to Hermann’s neck, more exposed in the regulation tan shirt than his normal clothes would allow, licking and sucking his way across Hermann’s jaw. Not to be outdone, Hermann took a shuddering breath and pulled Newt’s head up by the back of his hair, taking him away and exposing his neck. Newt gasped, a choked, desperate sound, and for a moment Hermann just held him there, marvelling at how quickly they could turn to animals, here in this tiny enclave of humanity. The wild expanse was inside them, too. 

“Hermann,” Newt all but whined, his hands pulling up the back of Hermann’s shirt to touch his skin, again, with apparently no point or strategy. He simply spread his palms over Hermann’s back, feeling his warmth. Hermann hummed, pleased, and lowered his head to kiss Newt’s neck, which was why he noticed. 

He froze. 

“What is it?” 

“Your tattoos are changed.” The words sounded strange in a way he couldn’t place. Wrong in his mouth. Are changed. Have changed? Are changing? Were they changing now, moving before his very eyes? Technically, yes. Everything always changed. They were, down to the very center, always in motion. Uncharacteristically, he felt dizzy just considering it, let alone the puzzle in front of him. 

“What?” Newt asked, so surprised he stepped back and looked down at once, holding out his arms in front of himself. “I- you're crazy, no way.” But still, he stared. At his arms. It was probably where he would always look first, easy to get to, easy to see. Easy to miss changes where he didn’t look, where he chose not to focus. It was how a map lied too, highlighting one area and obscuring another. 

“It's on your chest,” Hermann managed, still staring at the twisted face before him. It was difficult to describe. The figures weren’t quite the same, as though they'd shifted their weight, but they didn’t particularly look any different. Still, looking at them made his skin crawl. “I’ve seen them before, you know, and from straight on.” 

Newt made a face. “I think it's more likely that your perceptions have changed than the actual reality of my tattoos.”

He had a point, a good one. But Hermann knew. He shouldn’t. Nothing about what he was seeing now confirmed it. Onibaba stared back at him in flatness, more or less the same as it always had. How closely had he ever studied it? Hardly at all. Most of the time, he avoided it.  
But he knew it like he knew where the line was, where to run. “Alright.” 

“Great,” Newt said, slowly. No doubt thinking that Hermann had done this on purpose. Or that this was the second thing in half as many hours that Herman had, to all outside observers, imagined off the top of his head. 

It was in him to let it drop, or even to try to rekindle something of what they’d just had, what he’d inadvertently knocked off-course, but more so was the drive to know. “However, allow me to photograph you in order to track any potential differences, just for the sake of thoroughness.” 

“Yeah, ok,” Newt said, and then smirked. “Whatever excuse you need, man.” 

The joke didn’t sound right, likely because they both knew Hermann too well for it to be properly funny. Newt might as well have suggested that Hermann wanted to be outside in the first place. It was nonsense, which only left uncomfortable reality. 

Pointing that camera at Newt, he felt a great many things, all tangled up in mess. Together they got every angle, dividing Newts body up into quadrants, one, two, three and four. He had the oddest sensation that this was how Newt always thought of himself, as a collection of planes, rather than a complete organism. And one of those planes rested with Hermann now, in his mind, as a picture that would never change. 

***

“You boys find what you were looking for?”

Hermann turned, trying to bury his annoyance. Especially since it was always unlikely that Newt would do the same. The Specialist regarded him from his perch on the hood of the jeep, a cigarette burning to ash in his hand. He had plainly been waiting for them. 

Newt made an animal sort of noise and pointedly turned his attention to the sample bag, which was just as well. 

“Yes, thank you,” Hermann said, and held up his device. “We didn’t go far, of course. Just over the ridge, but I wanted to set up a range for the scans.” 

It was rather obvious that the Specialist didn’t care about the scans. His gaze flickered over them in turn, first Hermann, then Newt, who visibly bristled. “Look-”

“Yes, well.” Hermann set a hand on Newt’s arm, gripping tightly. “We must be going. Science, and all that.” 

Newt’s expression brightened in a manner that couldn't possibly be considered genuine. “Yeah. Science!” He laughed, far too loudly and then started walking, forcing Hermann to either let go, or follow. 

They left the Specialist behind, likely still watching them. Hermann felt his eyes on him, like he felt the watchful gaze of the entire atmosphere, as though the Zone were one continous organism, tracking them as they traversed the length of its spine. Once they crossed into their tent, Newt, predictably, exploded. 

“What is with that guy?” He tossed his hard won sample onto the table and started pulling out equipment with what was surely not enough care considering they were in the middle of nowhere with no hope of replacement. The microscope, dissection kit, Hermann watched it all piling up. 

“It appears that he doesn’t like us to leave camp, at least not alone,” Hermann said, keeping his voice low on instinct. 

“You mean not _together_.” Newt pointed at him with the scalpel. “I went out all the time at the last camp, with that soldier guy, or our assistant.” He frowned, and then turned to look over his shoulder. “Where is he?” 

Hermann waved a hand. “Well, that was the last camp. Maybe things are different now.” 

Newt crossed his arms, still holding the sharp tool, and so Hermann stepped forward to take it from him. It was almost a surprise when Newt let it go without a fuss, apparently caught in the web of his thoughts. Hermann could almost see them behind his eyes, arranging and shifting in a constant, if chaotic process he only understood because he had lived it. 

That living, the unity, even for a brief moment, had been divine in a way Hermann associated with long buried lessons in religion. The old angels, both beautiful and terrible. A deep power. Even tinted black by the presence of the hive mind, which was the devil. Overpowering and awful and breathtaking in its own way. 

He felt the urge to continue it, to follow it down to the natural conclusion. He would curl his fingers, lift Newt’s chin and kiss him, but then Newt made a sudden sound of frustration and lurched into action, making it necessary for Hermann to step back, out of the warpath. It was just as well, since he had his own research to concern himself with. That couldn’t be neglected, mutated animals or no. There was too much potential benefit on the table, and he would see it through.

Out of the corner of his eye, Hermann saw a sudden flash of light, or maybe color. He looked up, his gaze automatically drawn to the source, and saw Newt staring down at the insect blankly, scalpel still poised just above it. “Well that’s…” Newt trailed off, which was significantly odd enough to draw Hermann over. 

“What happened?” 

“I think I know what your hallucination was all about earlier.”

Hermann’s gaze dropped to his now covered chest, and noted that his sleeves were rolled up again. “Did you feel something?” 

“Not me,” Newt said, and turned the plexiglass cutting board he was working on at an angle, so Hermann could see better. 

“Should I be wearing safety goggles?” Hermann joked, trying to diffuse the tension. But to his surprise, Newt frowned. 

“Honestly?” He rummaged around in a box until he found a pair, and held them out. “I don’t know. So, probably.” 

Hermann slid them onto his face, feeling slightly nervous. Not so much at the situation, but at Newt’s behavior. It wasn’t like him to be serious, not during the war, not ever. Focused, yes. Driven, yes. Sober and weighted? Not ever. 

After adjusting his own glasses, which Hermann supposed were more or less acceptable, Newt cut into the sample again, this time above the thorax and into the head. The exoskeleton gave way, and it flashed blue for a just moment, before fading away. Hermann stared. “Well.” 

“Yeah, so. It looks like...there’s been some Blue contamination here.”

Hermann frowned. “That reaction seemed far too fast.” Everyone knew that Kaiju blood turned to the bloodmist, but it took hours, even days to take that effect. But that was after being within the Kaiju themselves, of course. 

“It was. The mutation but be really unstable. Or maybe it’s just different when adapted to Earth creatures. Environmental crossover might function differently than a more natural-” He waved a hand. “And the other thing is, this isn’t a water animal either.” 

“Have you seen this in water animals?” 

“No, that’s the thing. It would make sense for the water table to be impacted first, so I’ve been looking those.” 

“But really-” Hermann thought back. They’d only been in the field for a few days. “You haven’t looked at that many. It could just as easily-”

“Right,” Newt took his glasses off to rub at his eyes, but Hermann caught his hand before he could make contact. He got glared at, but it hardly mattered. “We need like, a whole team out here doing this.” 

“There will be one. We just need to get the initial findings.” 

“I guess,” Newt groused, because in times like these he was never satisfied, pushing the microscope away in favor of a magnifying glass, which he held over the main part of the bug. 

Hermann watched him look, which was why he saw how Newt didn't quite hide his expression of terror fast enough, at least from Hermann’s eyes, quickly changing it to a sort of performative fascination. Hermann didn’t like it. Newt should know better by now than to try to hide things from him. It was an odd thing to focus on, he knew, but the thought stayed true to the point that he pushed the issue. “Newton?”

But Newt didn’t seem to hear him. He was still looking at the sample, but blankly. It was unusual to the point that Hermann kept watching him, curious, so he saw it when Newt blinked, rolled his sleeve up, looked at his tattoo, and then back down at the sample. 

“Newton,” Hermann said again, this time much louder, and far less steady, and Newt looked up, his eyes now wide. “They’re not just mutations, you think they’re converging. The animals, and the Kaiju.”

For once, Newt didn’t launch into an immediate cascade of words. He sat down, and pulled his hand through his hair. “I know they are. It’s- I don’t see how it could be anything else.” 

It seemed like time should stop after a pronouncement like that, but of course it didn’t. For a long moment, Hermann stared at Newt, waiting for him to go on, to clarify, but he didn’t. 

Hermann walked back over to the other side of the tent for his stool, trying not to think about much of anything but the problem at hand. Trying not to notice that his leg wasn’t bothering him much. It hadn’t all day. Was there something under his skin too, part of a mystery? 

He dragged the stool to Newt’s table and sat down on it, his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together, determined to be a beacon or order among chaos. What did they know? 

“The creature we saw.”

Newt nodded, then frowned. “It didn’t look like a Kaiju.” 

“I agree.” 

“But maybe,” Newt’s hand drifted over to the other side of the table, where the drawings were still piled up. “Maybe a sort of, prototype?” 

Hermann’s eyebrows flew up, but before he could say anything, Newt held up a hand. “No! We already knew they Kaiju were, or are, I guess, somewhere, designed organisms. They’re clones, they were made, not born. Their blood is programmed to turn to mist, they’re engineered to kill us, and they could very well be anything else! It could happen!” 

“Yes, well…” Hermann thought back, really thought, bringing up the details. What had he seen? The dead city alive around him, Newt at his back, a shadow in the dark. Fine. He tilted his head, imagining a dividing line, a list. What had Newt told him? Hermann ‘acting crazy’, the creature, and before that, also a something that scared him, that made him stop. 

“What was it you saw? That night, you said you imagined something.” Hermann said, then bit his lip. It wouldn’t do to prompt him, to compromise his already fragile human memory, so fallible and complex. If he wasn’t careful, Hermann would fill all the gaps in his mind with himself, and then where would they be? 

Newt frowned. “How is that important right now?” 

“Just tell me, for once, do as I ask, please.” 

That seemed to get his attention, though he made a show of being difficult about it, crossing his arms over his chest and tipping his chin up. “Fine. You were running-”

“I’m sure I was not running, I-”

“Yeah, dude, you were. That’s a whole other, never mind- point being, I found you, and we were going back, and I looked ahead, and I saw this like, darkness. It thought maybe, a black hole? But obviously it was on the ground, and I only saw it for like, a second. It was just a shadow.” 

Hermann nodded. “I saw the same, after I fell.” 

Newt blinked at him. “Oh, well that’s, uh-” 

“Yes.” 

“It- I might have seen it again. Outside.” 

“What? That’s- we need to document,” Hermann said, sliding off the stool and pulling out fresh journals from the box. “We need to write down everything, and that way the other can review.”

Newt was watching him like he was a bomb that might go off at any moment. “Uh, yeah, or maybe we should just start talking to each other.”

There were layers to that, Hermann knew, and it didn’t seem like the time for most of them. But things, it seemed, could mean more than one thing at once. Be more than one thing. Perhaps they could too. Be the scientists, and the instigators, and the emulators, and something else. Hermann nodded. 

“Yes, and there’s another thing as well.”

“Do we tell the Analyst?” Newt asked, and then groaned. “He probably knows, dude. Think about it.”

It was a horrible thing to say, and an even worse thing to seriously consider about an officer of the PPDC. The thought hadn’t previously occurred to Hermann, who had spent so long learning the honor of authority. 

And what about the Specialist? But now that Newt had said it, now that Hermann felt what he said, known what he felt, he saw it too. The walls of the tent were nothing, offering no protection at all, and he felt them closing in, wrapping them both up in a strangling web. Hermann sat back down, his leg suddenly feeling rather weak. “I’m sure he does. We still have to decide.”

Newt groaned and pressed his palms to his eyes. “Fuck.”

Normally, Hermann would glare and tell him off. He would make some snide comment about Newt’s language and lack of basic professionalism. Normally Newt would have lifted his head by now. He would have made a joke. 

They sat in a growing silence, listening to the wind against the side of the tent instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> late late late~ I'm almost finished with the rest of it though! 
> 
> paradiamond.tumblr.com ~~


	5. INVERSION

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.” Annihilation, ch. 1, p. 6.

“We’re here.” 

Even after everything they had seen, the shock hit Hermann like a train. 

He couldn’t help it, hated it, feeling slow like this. But Newt was frowning too. Oakland was gone. Taken. Whatever had been left after Trespasser’s attack had been corroded away, whittled down to nothing, and a forest now stood in its place. Nature had taken it back. The Blue was corrosive, but it was also, apparently, transformative. 

“How long has it been like this?” Newt asked, and it scared Hermann that he said it so calmly, no anger, no bubbling excitement. Just that lazer focus, a kind of still water. It made Hermann feel like they were about to be hit by a wave. 

The Specialist didn’t answer him, already getting out of the jeep and beginning to set about putting camp together. Hermann watched him move, his mind still caught on the sight around them, surrounding them. The display lights in the jeep flickered, and then went out. 

It could have been any amount of time. No one would have known. Then again, someone likely had. Anyone who cared to pay attention wouldn’t have been let in, not this deep into the SFEZ. A chill ran up his spine at the thought of this happening, growing, while they were off in bases in Anchorage and Hong Kong. Towards the end, they were the entire science division. Was it kept from them? 

That, he knew, wasn’t entirely fair. They had bigger, more destructive things to be concerned with at the time. 

But not all the time, surely. There was waiting, and regrouping, and planning. Not a single report on this in twelve years? 

Hermann pulled the Geiger counter higher, just to check. Still benign. A drop of sweat rolled down his back. What had seemed fascinating and so all-consumingly positive before now felt sinister. Why weren’t they dying here? They should be dead. Everything in a ten mile radius should be dead. 

“You boys good?” 

Next to him, Hermann felt Newt tense up. The Specialist seemed to have that effect on everyone, especially recently, when he had them start packing up in the middle of the night. Hermann turned to face him, hands folded over his cane, trying to project calm. “Of course.” 

The Specialist nodded, already turning from them to raise a cigarette to his mouth. He watched the trees, eyes scanning left, right, then up. Repeat. Hermann didn’t press, especially since he wasn’t the one that really concerned him. Skilled or not, he was just a hired gun. The man in charge was a much more insidious presence, all smiles and watchful eyes. 

When they went to the Analyst with their findings, he made a big show about checking his little black box and then brushed them off. It was enough to shock Hermann, who thought he had long maxed out his capacity to find other people dangerous or disappointing. He’d seen it all in the war. But he and Newt told him in no uncertain terms that the Blue was altering, likely at a DNA level, both plant and animal life in this Zone and possibly others. To some extent, the Kaiju were regenerating themselves, building themselves up from adapted materials. They explained that the team should leave, get help, tell the rest of the PPDC. But the Analyst insisted that it was fine, they had it under control, that they should keep working. It was perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the entire experience. 

“I still think we should, you know.” Newt eyed the trees as they walked, aimlessly making their way around camp. They had so little equipment there wasn’t much point in supervising. 

Hermann suppressed a sigh. “I know you do.” 

Newt had suggested leaving, going to the PPDC from the outside, or even through the media, but Hermann talked him down in hushed tones, sitting with their heads together in their darkened tent. Their situation was nowhere near that dire, and besides, now that there weren't giant monsters attacking cities, he would be shocked if the public cared. It didn't matter if the changing animals were in fact more dangerous, it wasn't something they would see, not after adjusting to the idea of giant monsters from deep in the ocean. 

Not the mention, and he didn’t, not to Newt, that as far as the public was concerned, the Breach was an unintentional formation that allowed monsters from another world to slip through, following animal instinct. That was the old story, the first theory, and the PPDC let them keep it. To their thinking, to suggest a more purposeful design would be reckless, even if it was true. 

“Hermann, look, holy shit.” 

Newt’s tone made Hermann look up immediately, his hackles rising. At first, he didn’t see it, expecting some kind of mutant wandering into camp, or maybe a giant shadow come to drive them out, a living terror. Then he blinked, and noticed the Analyst closing the door to one of the jeeps. Starting it. Driving away. 

“Oh, god.” 

“Shut up.” 

“Hermann-” 

“Be quiet.” Hermann turned away, craning his neck until he found what he was looking for. It was easy to spot him again, all broad shoulders and stillness, a testament to how small their camp had gotten. When had that happened? Hermann put it away, falling back on dealing with one problem at a time as he walked over to the Specialist, who watched him the whole way, still smoking. 

“Doctor.” 

Hermann stopped about three feet away, and Newt ran straight into his back, nearly knocking him over. One of the men unpacking the tent laughed. The Specialist didn’t crack a smile. 

“He’s just going off on his business. Don’t worry about it, just keep doing your good work.” 

Hermann frowned. They kept saying that, every time Hermann asked a question, or brought up a problem, reminding them to work, making sure they still could. At his back, Newt bristled. “Listen here, guy, we need to know-” 

“I just told you what you need to know.” 

“How-” Newt started, his voice jumping several octaves all at once, and Hermann grabbed him hard under the elbow. 

“Of course,” Hermann said, very loudly. “We were merely concerned.” 

The Specialist made a sound like a growl, which Hermann supposed was a laugh. “What, just now?” 

A shudder passed through Newt and into Hermann, buzzing like a livewire. 

***

“Thing thing that I don’t understand is how- hey, don’t pull.” 

“Hold still then,” Hermann said, prodding him in the back to make him stand straighter. Newt sighed but did it, holding still for the length of exactly one picture, tracking the ‘imaginary’ changes in his tattoos. 

“What doesn’t make sense here, at least terestially speaking, is the DNA melding.”

Hermann nodded along, taking another picture of his back. It _was_ different, the pictures shifted inward, pulling in like a spiral. He tried to think of something else to say. “Is that what you’re observing?” 

“Well, I think so.” Newt shrugged his shirt back on. “But it’s hard to tell with the outdated equipment.” 

Hermann hummed sympathetically, then paused. “Teresitally in what sense?”

Newt dropped down onto the stool and started pulling through the papers. “Uh, in the sense that our DNA and theirs doesn’t work the same. Like, at all. That’s why it took so long to figure out what was going on with them.”

“Because how can two vastly different creatures have the exact same DNA?” 

Newt bobbed his head. “Right. It’s like a totally different language, pretty much. But this, this is more like interconnected pieces, put together like a jigsaw puzzle.” 

Hermann picked at the edge of the drawing that had landed closest to him from Newt’s sprawl. Their attempt to put to paper what they had seen, like a thing sewn together. 

Newt continued on. “So they can’t really be Kaiju, since the Kaiju are cloned from a central location, like a genetic database.” 

“Whereas this is something new,” Hermann said, thinking about shapes in the trees and radiation that didn’t stick. A new form. “Perhaps that’s where we went wrong with these.” He held up the drawings. “We were trying to draw the pieces, connect it to something we knew, instead of just capturing what we saw.” 

“That’s a good-” Newt cut himself off, bending at the waist to get into the box near his feet. Then he sat back up, frowning. “My notebook’s gone.” 

It was a testament to how suspicious Hermann had grown of their team that his first thought was that it had likely driven away with the Analyst. He closed his eyes, feeling the rise of dread, anger, frustration. Then he breathed, and let it pass through him, so that only choice remained. 

“Hermann?” 

He blinked open his eyes to see Newt, wide eyes amplified under his glasses, the sharpness there. Instinct. He pushed himself up, leaning on the cane that came and went in terms of usefulness. One moment there, and gone the next. 

The intense interest of the Specialist, the clear fact that something was not only happening to this place, the animals in it, but to them as well. They had to keep going, head towards San Francisco, where an extraction team would be waiting, rather than trying to go back at the way through the Zone. 

“You’re right,” Hermann said, and was a little annoyed to see Newt’s eyebrows fly up in surprise. “We should go.” 

Newt jumped up so quickly the stool fell and clattered to the floor. “That’s what I’ve been saying!” 

“I know!” 

“Ok-” Newt spun around and started rifling through the mess. “We’ll only take what we need. Can you take a look at the map and figure out the right way? We don’t want to get stopped.” 

Hermann didn’t answer, abruptly and completely uncomfortable, which was ridiculous. The map was only paper and ink. He spotted it under a stack of drawings and tugged it free, and jolted. The red line, but worse, the blue he could instantly recognize as the path they followed the night they ran out of camp. 

“Hermann?” 

It was the path of Trespasser, marked out clearly in a dotted line. The Dark blue. Where he dripped blood. 

“Are you ok?” 

He shook his head, feeling like a Trespasser in his own mind. “No, we need to go.” 

They would deal with the consequences when they got out, but above all they needed to communicate what they knew to Marshall Hansen, and regroup. 

***

Leaving camp was easy. They were expected to do field research, and they had done it before. The Specialist watched them go, but didn’t follow. He even offered Newt a spare weapon, ‘for bears’ he said, probably trying to scare them. They didn’t take it, despite knowing that there were quite possibly much worse things than bears out in the heart of the Zone. But he let them go, apparently unconcerned that they might try to stay gone. To be fair, it was a rather desperate plan, but they had beaten tighter odds before, not so long ago. 

Still, Hermann’s heart pounded with every step carefully made, easing his cane ahead of his steps, flicking away the odd branch or scrap of disintegrated city. Bike tire, moss covered sphere, perhaps a ball, encroaching flowers. They walked close, shoulders brushing, moving as one, seeing the same things. When Hermann turned his head, he saw Newt mirror him out of the corner of his eye. 

There was no seeing around the forest. Hermann didn’t even know where they would start. Cities have clear lines of delineation, even the ones that slowly blend into the suburbs and then back into wilderness. Here, wilderness was all there was. 

They moved deeper into what used to be Oakland. Scraps of it still remained, now that they had the opportunity to look closer. Metal embedded in the stems of plants. Asphalt under moss. An odd collection of what seemed to be kitchen appliances most of the way up a tree that Hermann suspected was not quite a tree at all. The birds not birds either, though he had no proof of that. His gaze was suddenly drawn by Newt, who had stopped, seemingly at random, to look back over his shoulder. 

Hermann wrapped both hands over the handle of his cane and pressed down, feeling the pressure bunch in the muscles of his arms. Solidity. “Well don’t just stand there.” 

Newt shot him a dry look and then darted off the forest path which Hermann’s mind immediately connected to a street, and therefore the evenly spaced groups of trees, buildings. “I need a rock!” Newt squaked, rooting around in the growth he probably shouldn’t touch with his bare hands. 

“For the love of God, why?” Hermann followed him, ducking under a low hanging branch studded with long dead lightbulbs. 

Newt ignored him, rooting around in the growth and coming out with two pieces of what looked like a old brick, now oddly stained. Hermann watched as Newt pulled the black box from his belt and set it on one of them, raising the other up to smash it before Hermann could even think to stop him. It cracked and broke immediately, one side falling away to reveal a hollow interior. 

“Nothing.” Newt picked up the pieces, peering at them from all angles. Nothing about it suggested an ability to turn red in response to anything. There was no interior mechanism at all. “Great.” 

Hermann looked down at his own box, now more innocuous than ever. Just a trick. A drop of sweat rolled down his back. They’d been issued the boxes back at headquarters. He shook his head, and something caught his eye. 

“Ok, so-” 

“Newton.”

His tone of voice must have been enough, because Newt quieted immediately and followed his gaze to the thing making its way over to them. Hermann wanted it to be a crocodile, but it was wrong, off somehow. The joints, maybe. More importantly, it was headed their way, but very slowly, stopping every few feet as if to size them up, it’s huge head swaying from side to side. 

Hermann grabbed at his own waist, but of course they hadn't taken the weapon. It would have been too suspicious otherwise. 

“Shit.” Newt turned in a full circle. “Should we- why is it doing that?” 

“How should I know?” Hermann asked, unsure of what it was doing that was so odd, besides not trying to kill them. But it was a wild animal, wary of humans. He looked around, spotting a raised mound, moss-covered, perhaps what used to be a car. 

He pulled Newt over to it, overcoming his instinct not to turn his back on the danger to boost them both up and onto the slightly safer platform. The moss was slippery, barely adhered to the the now clearly mental structure. Newt kept a firm grip on his arm, still watching the reptile with singular intensity. 

It was rocking on its feet now, back and forth, as though preparing to roll up to its back feet. But it would never be able to support itself that way, and it seemed to know it. Frustration was an odd look on an animal. Hermann frowned at it, and it took another step forward, making him jump. 

“Should we try to scare it off?” He tried not to descend into manic laughter. A slow moving terror. 

“I...guess?” Newt tilted is head to the side. “We aren’t really close enough to water for it-”

Hermann could punch him. “Let’s leave that aside for now.”

“Does it look Kaiju to you?” 

“It looks dangerous.” 

“It looks unstable. Like a decaying particle.” 

Hermann risked looking away to cast a glance at Newt. He’d been doing that more and more, borrowing from Hermann’s field and applying it to his own, but unconsciously. Not two weeks ago he remarked that on a molecular level, physics and biology were the same thing, which had certainly not been a feature of their arguments over the years. The odd part was that Hermann found that he now agreed. 

“Holy shit!” 

Hermann jumped so hard he nearly fell of the car, but Newt’s grip on him was absolute. “What-” 

The reptile was staring at them with a single minded intensity, an open sort of fear in its gaze, and creeping backwards, its head pressed so low to the ground that its jaw dragged a line in the moss. Odd, but ultimately positive for their situation as it disappeared, back from wherever it had come from. 

“Crocodiles- most reptiles really-” 

“They can’t go backwards.” Even Hermann knew that. 

Newt nodded, fascinated and horrified beyond words. Then he blinked and looked down at Hermann’s legs. “Are you ok?” 

“Ah-” Hermann blinked and realized that he’d climbed up on the car without feeling it. That he was currently squatting at ease with the cane hanging loosely at his side. “I...don’t know.” 

He was free of pain in a way that he’d hadn’t been in years, decades even, and it did nothing but make him feel numb, as though he was detached from himself. It should have been good. One less thing to worry about at the very least. But his body was in pieces, made from disconnected parts, a program no longer talking to itself. 

He stood, cautious. It wasn’t right. There was no explanation for it, and therefore he couldn't trust it. Besides, if the Blue was giving this to him without him even noticing, what might he lose the same way? 

The idea of being changed, even in a way that would, all else being equal, be considered to be a good thing, without his knowledge, didn't sit well with him. His mind shied away from it. 

Hermann frowned, carefully stepping down next to a flowering bicycle. Was that it? Perhaps something was tricking his mind away from the pain, camouflaging it, and he was actually further damaging himself with each step, hurting himself and unable to feel it. 

Still, there was nothing to do but keep going. 

Behind them was just a blank map, empty and unmarked. 

They couldn’t go back. 

***

It was dark in the car, darker than it should have been for the time of night, even considering the moss. 

Outside, the trees were thickly clustered together, blocking out the sun and so tall they reached higher than Hermann could see, disappearing up into the sky. 

Hermann was uncomfortably reminded of his first night in the Hong Kong Shatterdome, not when he’d arrived, he had very little memory of most of the day. The moment that stood out in his mind, sitting like a small beacon, still floating in the water, was when he'd retired to his new quarters for the night. 

After spending so long in advanced universities, hospitals, and research facilities, he'd gotten used to automatic, motion sensor lights. As such, he closed the door to his room before reaching for the switch, and experienced a brief moment of terrible shock and panicked confusion to suddenly find himself in complete darkness, so much so that it didn't occur to him to move, to fix it, for several long seconds. 

For such a mundane incident, it had stuck to him like a film he couldn't wipe off, almost unnoticeable until he happened to catch sight of it again. But then it sat on his shoulder, heavy, the idea that the light might go out at any minute, and that there would be nothing he could do about it the next time. This darkness was like that imagined darkness, given life and tangible form around them. 

It was only Newt’s presence, his breathing, his warmth, that kept him sane and in his seat. 

“Do you think it’s clear?” 

Hermann didn’t bother to look. They had no way of knowing, which, to be fair, was not what Newt had asked him. “I think the creature had enough time to get away, assuming that’s what it wanted.”

“You know, if that’s the worst this place has to offer, we’ll probably be fine.” 

Hermann turned his head to look at him. “I think a fully grown aquatic reptile like that is more than enough of a threat to us.” 

Newt smirked. “I meant like, to us as a race. Humans.” 

“Oh.” Hermann cocked his head, putting aside the unsettling implication of a world going on without them. “That’s true.” 

“We’ve had worse!” 

Hermann laughed. “Yes.” 

His laugh caught Newt too. “I just can’t believe we have to spend the night in this car!” 

“We’ve had worse,” Hermann said, managing a solid three seconds of deadpan humor before he cracked again. 

“Have we?” Newt asked, barely able to breathe through his wheezing. 

Hermann shook his head, grinning so hard his mouth hurt like it might split. “I suppose it was too much to ask to save the world twice.”

“Yeah! Let someone else figure it out this time.” He scooted down in his seat, putting his feet up on the dash. “We’re tired.” 

Hermann was not tired. He was thrumming with energy, nervous and excited. Residual adrenaline. But he hummed in agreement anyway. “Agreed. Get someone else to fix the animals, we fixed the tear!” 

Newt tilted his head, staring at him. “Why do you keep calling it that?”

Hermann frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You keep calling the Breach a ‘tear.’ It’s weird.”

Hermann stared at him. “Well, that’s what it is. Was. It was a subatomic tear in the fabric-”

“Fine, fine,” Newt put his hands up in the air, his arms glistening with sweat, making the tattoos shimmer and dance. It turned Hermann’s stomach so badly he had to look away. “I’m just saying. You didn’t used to call it that.”

The wind shifted, and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. “I- it’s the only logical name to describe it.” 

Newt glanced at him, his glasses momentarily magnifying his eye to a disconcerting size as he turned his head. “Breach, dude. It’s always been the Breach.” 

“That’s an incomplete…” Hermann cocked his head to the side, trying to fit a circle into a square. “It is a tear.” 

“Ok.”

Hermann turned to look through the speckling moss that covered the window. He could imagine patterns there, if he wanted to. Words, moving under his skin. He turned back. “I can’t think of it as anything else.” 

Newt stared. Hermann didn’t know why he’d felt the need to say it either. The silence in the car grew oppressive, adding to the physical force of heat and humidity. Hermann’s skin itched, matching the itch in his mind, dancing right at the edge of what he could reach. It was maddening. He grabbed for the door handle. “We should keep moving.” 

“I- what? Hermann it just got dark!” 

It didn’t matter. He jerked the door open, the hinges protesting against the strain after years of disuse, and froze. One of the shadow at the edge of the trees moved, detaching itself from the rest of the darkness. Their shadow. “Get back in the car.” 

“That’s what I just- oh shit.” 

The shape slunk along the ground, then rose, up and up onto the back legs, some of its features coming into sight for the first time in the darkness. Hermann squinted. At full height it was nearly eight feet tall and absolutely confounding. A creature, but not one they’d ever seen before. Had it followed them all the way from Sacramento? 

His mind catching up with the shock of the situation, Hermann ducked down behind the car door, motioning for Newt to do the same on his side. It was too late, the creature, whatever it was, had clearly already spotted them, had likely been waiting for them long before they became aware of it. The car wasn’t safe, but there was nowhere else to go, unless they could outrun it, which Hermann doubted. On the other side, Newt made a loud noise and threw something into the woods to their left, but the creature didn’t turn it’s head. 

“I hope that wasn’t our weapon.” 

“No. Don’t move,” Newt said, lowly, and Hermann nodded. It seemed their best shot would be to keep still and quiet, not to provoke it by running. 

The part of him that still remembered who he was raised the camera, shaking so badly he could hardly make his fingers move to take the picture. The face resembled a boar, but the ears and nose were dog-like. It rested above a broad furry body that somehow transitioned to a scaled stomach, plated and hard like a turtle’s shell. The front legs were hoofed, but the ones in the back were hugely muscled and clawed. Behind it, at least two tails swung, balancing out the massive front half. The entire thing was twisted up in vines, like bandages, studded in blue flowers. 

Not an animal, the look in its eyes made that distinction impossible, though it was clearly made from them, cobbled together from spare and stolen parts. Rebuilding itself, or making something new? 

“Move!” 

Hermann jerked his head around, so startled he nearly fell to the ground, the sound of another human voice shocking him into looking away from the creature. The missing Soldier from camp who had ‘gone home’ shouldn’t have been more shocking than the creature they were currently facing, but it certainly felt that way. Hermann stood stock still, struck dumb. “You-”

“I said move!” he yelled again, this time right on top of Hermann’s terrible hiding spot, using the edge of the car door as a stand to brace the muzzle of his gun. Hermann moved, making for the back of the car to catch Newt. 

A shot rang out, and the creature screamed. 

The sound drove a stake right through Hermann’s heart. He’d heard it before, that scrape of metal against metal, carried across the water and re-played over monitors and security feeds. It was like his mind seized, a prey animal caught in the grip of raw, locked down fear. The sound of Kaiju. Invaders, killers. 

Newt grabbed him by the arm and hauled him up and away, all but carrying him as the thing charged the car, now furious. Hermann craned his head back to see it drop back down the ground, moving fast. “Look out!” 

The Soldier jumped away just as the thing collided with the car, flipping it onto the side. The ground shook.

“Come on man, move!” 

The Soldier tried, scrambling up, getting the gun back up first, the muscle memory and training kicking in hard. Not fast enough. 

The shadow took him, swallowing him up at the sound of bullets went off like firecrackers in the clearing, too loud. When it reared back, the Soldier was on the ground, a cartoonish display of gore and death. But the creature was screaming, skittering back, hurt. 

It bent backwards, and Blue sprayed from its wounds. It didn’t have the armor the Kaiju had, not yet, and as it reared back, one of the interlocked pieces, the one that had been hit, Hermann realized, came detached from the rest of the body in a horrific display of self preservation. A lizard shedding its tail to get away. Only this tail was what appeared to be the entire back side of an animal, coming apart from the bulk of the creature’s chest. 

It whirled, making for the trees again, and a drop of Blue hit Newt, staining him. One drop on his face, marking him just under his eye to sit like a tear that would never fall. He was staring at the fallen Soldier, the body, Hermann realized, that was then suddenly ripped away, back into the dark. Taken. 

Hermann’s heart pounded, drowning out everything else. No sound, no air. Dual compulsions rose up in him, the urge to flee and the urge to follow the trail, find the answer. The pursuit of knowledge had been his constant companion since he was a child. Newt was beside him, shaking so badly it seemed he was seizing, going into shock. Burning, sprayed by the toxic blood of a monster. Hermann made a choice, grabbed for his hand. 

They ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for sticking with it! Almost done now, I'm getting really excited (: 
> 
> ALSO there is now art! It's super cute, please check it out and support this new awesome person, k-sci-janitor! http://k-sci-janitor.tumblr.com/post/180208950930/uh-if-youre-into-annihilation-type-newmann-fics


	6. Inversion 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The air was so clean, so fresh, while the world back beyond the border was what it had always been during the modern era: dirty, tired, imperfect, winding down, at war with itself. Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.” Annihilation, ch. 1, p. 30.

When the sun came up, there was still nowhere else to go. Newt had said it when they rested for the night, and in the light of day Hermann could see that he was right. Not forward, where the more advanced nightmares were likely waiting, and not to side in either direction, off the path where their Creature might be recovering, so they went back to camp, hearts in their throats. The whole way, Newt kept wiping at his face where the Blue had touched him, smearing his tear into a smudge and getting it on his hand, and Hermann kept telling him to stop. They maintained this game up all the way to the end, when they saw tents. But no vehicles. 

“Well shit,” Newt said, and Hermann shushed him. 

Another fews steps and they saw that the tents were all open, partially stripped but entirely in shambles. There was a full crate of canned food spilled on the ground to their left, and a pair of boots sitting under a tree near some tire marks. One tent was actually fully collapsed, as though someone had started packing it away and then stopped. No people, not even the Specialist. 

Newt took in a shuddering breath, and didn’t let it go again until Hermann grabbed his arm. “Ok,” he said, eyes darting around like he missed something. “Ok, well. At least we’re not in trouble.” 

That was plainly not true, though Hermann didn’t say so. 

“So, ok, no Specialist. So at least we’re not going down commando style. Like in-” 

“Do you see the communications relay?” Hermann asked, pulling what seemed to be a random collection of items out of a box. Cooking supplies mixed in with a spare uniform, two of the useless little black boxes and one of Hermann’s seismic measurement tools. They had left in a hurry. He pulled the tool out and set it aside. 

In their search of the camp, it became clear that the Specialist had left the majority of his things, including the radio and a satellite phone, which made Hermann immediately suspicious. He didn’t seem like the sort of man to forget anything, so it had been a choice, weighed and made. 

“They’re spares,” Newt said, already pulling at wires and testing the connections. 

Hermann frowned. “How do you know?” 

“I snuck around in his tent a bit.” 

Hermann sputtered. “What?” 

Newt looked up from his work just to roll his eyes. “What! He was super suspicious, I was checking it out.” 

“You-” Hermann shook his head. “Fine. It doesn’t matter. Is that ready?”

It was. They called in for backup, help. To Newt’s visible surprise, someone answered. Emergency services relaying their message to military services cleared to enter the Zone. They were getting transport. A team was on its way. 

Hermann nodded, mostly to himself as Newt was in the process of rigging the SAT phone to call PPDC, which they then did, and moved through clearance level by level until they were talking to someone important enough. The only downside was that it was not Marshall Hansen, but a man directed to them by the Marshall, identifying himself as the Director. They outlined what they’d seen, and shared a look when he seemed suspiciously calm about it. 

“Sir,” Newt said, the word sounding wrong in his mouth as Hermann raised his head yet again to scan the landscape. He couldn’t stop, and he didn’t know what he would do if he saw something. “This thing, the Creature, has a- at least one human body. There’s no way of knowing if it’s able to adapt to it just but-” 

“Understood. Backup is on the way.” 

They were transferred back to the Marshall, then to another, then another technician. They were told to wait, to make a perimeter and watch it. They hung up. 

“Huh.” Newt stared down at the giant phone. “Ok.” 

Hermann nodded. 

“What now?” 

“We do the work.” 

***

They consolidated everything into one tent. Newt sat scribbling away, muttering to himself. Hermann didn’t have anything useful of his own equipment left, so he developed the pictures. 

Newt’s tattoos were different. The pictures were solid proof, as much as anything could be at this point. Hermann took the time to develop them in any case, unsure why. There was no one left to show them to. Maybe they’d be helpful for those that came looking. 

When he showed them to Newt, he went a little green. Vacant. “Why is this...why is this bothering- I mean, after everything-”

“Ah, ok.” Hermann touched his shoulder, trying to calm him down. 

Newt shook it off. “I’m just gonna-” He gestured to the tent flap and left. This was normal for their lab, Newt taking off without notice or explanation, but that was there, where it was safe. Where they assumed it was relatively safe, that was. 

Hermann fidgeted, then stood up and followed him outside. 

Newt hadn’t gone far, just to where the jeeps had been parked. It was quiet again, it was too much. Hermann stared out at the trees. “You said this would happen.”

A dark look passed over Newt’s face. “Yeah, I never trusted those guys-”

“No, I mean this. All of this.”

Newt frowned, the expression pulling at the blue stain on his face. “No? I think I would remember that.” 

Hermann snorted. “Apparently not. Though, to be fair, you were rather shaken up at the time.”

“I don’t-”

“You described the Kaiju as Hounds. You said, to me and Marshall Pentecost, that they were the first wave, that the second wave-”

“Was the exterminators.” Newt made a face, horrible and twisted. “I didn’t- I didn’t know it meant this. I thought it was just, you know, bigger ones.” 

“Not smaller.” Hermann nodded, horror and fascination fighting a war within him. “This is chemical. Biological warfare disguised as monsters.” 

Before, theorizing had been somewhat exciting, even with the threat of total annihilation under the foot of some beast. Now, it was just dread. 

“But,” Newt shook his head, like he was trying to clear it. “Ok, sure, but I was wrong, they’re coming back in an ineffective way. You saw that thing back there. It was scary as hell to us, but to a real army? We won’t even need Jaegers to fight that.” 

It was uncomfortable. Hermann didn’t usually put much stock in feelings, but it felt wrong, if only because Newt got that theory, those words, straight from the Drift, which had yet to be wrong about anything. 

“So, ok.” Newt’s hands flew up to grind into his eyes, under his glasses. “Let’s just say that this is happening.”

It was bizarre, bordering on idiotic, after what they had seen. “Alright,” Hermann said, slowly, and then felt compelled to continue. “Which it likely is.”

Newt shushed him violently, his hands flailing. “Let just say, ok? The biggest earth animal today is...what? A whale? A blue whale? And that’s in the ocean.”

Hermann considered this. “We shouldn’t discount the ocean. Slattern and Raiju both died in the Pacific.”

“Blown out of existence by a nuclear bomb! Probably not that much blood left.”

“Many others fought and bled in the ocean.” He paused. “Assuming it is the blood.”

“I think we can.” Newt actually rubbed his hands together. “Ok, so maybe there was enough Blue contamination then, and in other fights, to impact the over 700 million cubic meters of water. Maybe. With runoff, and-”

“I get the point, Newton.”

“Do you? Because I’m saying we- we like humanity, I mean, can totally deal with this. Even if the world’s biggest animals, water or land, start piecing themselves together to try to kill us, we can deal with it. We’ve handled worse before, clearly. It’ll become like, a new normal. A new new normal.”

Hermann regarded him in silence. Newt continued to work himself up. “I think- I think the real problem. That would be if it spread.”

Neither of them had to clarify what he meant by that, nor did they want to. It sent them back into silence. Uncomfortable, tense. Temporary. 

“Do they know? They must know, right? Not just the Analyst and the Specialist, I mean. Control.”

Hermann frowned. “Most likely.” 

Newt shook his head. “Right? I think they have to. We’re smart, but like, if they’d been here at all they must have seen enough to put it together. Yeah, so...”

“What?”

“Why are we here? If they already knew.”

Hermann considered this. “Perhaps they were researching us? Because of the Drift?”

Newt made a face. “Maybe, but then why send us here? Why not keep us under lab conditions-”

“The interaction with the Blue Zone, obviously.” 

“To see how we’re changing? Reacting to it?” Newt cocked his head to the side. “But we were barely observed, they pretty much just left us alone.” 

“As far as we know.” 

A shiver so strong Hermann could see it ran up Newt’s back, and before he could question it, Hermann reached out. It was a testament to how panicked Newt was that he automatically folded into the touch, pressing close, putting his face near Hermann’s neck and just breathing. Hermann held on and resisted the urge to let go and move, to take on the next task. There wasn’t one, not really. 

It seemed they had run out of things to do but wait. Oddly, after what had happened, the camp felt relatively safe, though he was beginning to understand that there was no way to tell. Hermann was acutely aware of the ways in which they’d been compromised. 

He hoped that the radio signal had gone through, that they hadn’t been talking to no one, and hearing what they wanted to hear back. Even as Newt shifted in his arms, and breathed and was demonstrably fine, at least for the moment, he couldn’t stop analyzing his own behavior over the past days and seeing the holes, the red flags in his responses. 

Had it make sense for them to try to walk the rest of the way to San Francisco? It didn’t make sense to him now, looking down at the map with the blue stripe in his mind. 

None of these thoughts were comforting. The sensation of not knowing what was real and what was perhaps something planted in him, deep in his mind. He sounded like Newt. He was desperate for an anchor. Newt had always been there. He couldn't remember a time before him. When Newt shifted, Hermann bent with him, leaned in, kissed him. 

The sense memory of this was so strong, it moved Hermann back, and he saw himself in their shared tent. The generator had been low that night, casting the space in a dim, haunting light. They had just gotten back from their ill-advised sprint through the city and seeing the shadow for the first time. 

Hermann sat down on the bed, tired and a bit disturbed. There were too many thoughts in his mind, and it shied away from them. 

Newt came and sat by him, close on the bed, leg to leg. They’d had a couch in their shared lab. This was that. He set his hand on Hermann’s shoulder and his throat tightened in gratitude. 

“You...alright?” 

Clearly Newt didn’t know how to speak unless he said everything at once. Hermann just nodded, focusing on the rustle of the wind against the tent fabric. After a long moment, Newt stood, and Hermann’s hand shot out without his permission to grab his wrist. Then he let go as though he’d been burned, but it was already done. 

Newt climbed back in the bed, moving Hermann around like a doll. On his side with his good leg up, back to chest, Newt’s nose in his hair and still in their outside clothes. 

They woke up again in the dark of the night. It was difficult to tell what time it was all the way out in the wild. Neither of them wanted to move. It would change them, take them from this place they had unwittingly found. 

Newt kissed him, again, but not on the mouth. It was easier like that, without sight. The feel of his lips on the back of his neck was like a cool breeze, outside himself, but welcome. 

They fed from each other’s energy, sharing heat, touch. An inevitability. Then they fell back asleep. 

To this shock, this time Newt pushed him away. 

“Just- hang on.” He was wide-eyed and nervous. “I worry about what if would mean to- to love you, you know? Like what it would mean. If that would just be loving myself. Selfish.”

Hermann’s fingers played with the edges of Newt’s sleeves, nervous too. Agitated. It occurred to him to say that it didn't seem like Newt would have a problem with that level of narcissism, to be flippant and leave. 

Leave and go where? 

“We’re not the same person,” Hermann heard himself say, as if from a distance. Inside, he shrank. He didn't, could not speak of this. They were one, always. They were two together. 

Newt finally looked up. “I feel like we are sometimes, more and more. I think- it's like we’re doing things at the same time, like taking a drink, or tying shoes. Even when I'm not looking at you I know. I can feel it.”

The clenching in his chest. A drop of sweat dripped down his spine. But this time he didn't run, there was nowhere to run to. 

“I know.”

Thinking like that, of before and after, as though the invasion had ended, as though something had closed, was part of what got them into this in the first place. The desire to draw lines, to put up walls between themselves and the monsters, was as useless now as it had been when the threat was spectacular, as opposed to the insidious crawl of this, the desolation of it. 

He knew Newt saw it too, though he pretended he didn't. Or maybe he'd been used to looking at the world that way for so long it simply wasn't a change for him. Either way, Hermann found himself terrified, and resentful towards Newt for not following him down that path, for leaving him alone. 

*** 

Hermann sat very still, lost in thought in the mess of the tent. Maybe, maybe. But if that was it, why all the bother? Why bring them here? 

Maybe it was something they needed them to do, to figure out for them. They being Newt. It was always about Newt, his research, his- but it wasn’t. Not if they knew about the Blue contamination the entire time. But then, what?

Hermann’s gaze caught on the notebooks scattered all over the floor of the tent. 

Maybe it was all about him. Energy fluctuations. Contamination, they said. Of what? The Blue, obviously. But what would that have to do with technology? He shuffled over to the piles and picked one up at random. Numbers from the Geiger counter, listed in neat rows. 

Hermann knew how to think of this, how to think around the problem. If only he could do his calculations, maybe he could put a name to the beast. In which case, it occurred to him, he should just do it himself. 

Newly energized, he sat back down, poured over the pages and pages of data, of observations he’d taken on inferior instruments, and did the thing he does best. Math. 

Once, he and Newt had taken a submarine ride down to the site of the Tear, now destroyed. They were investigating, one of very few to have the opportunity to do so. This project felt like that deepness, going farther and farther into the dark. The physical pressure, the strain. And all the while, Newt was with him. 

He’d already ostracized the captain of the vessel with some comment Hermann immediately forgot, and he managed to disturb the rest of the crew soon after by suggesting that he and Hermann might Drift again. The techs stared. 

Hermann didn’t respond, there was no need. The converging of their thoughts processes, more than their actual thoughts, had already linked them in ways he wouldn’t have expected. They were a species of two sharing one mind, descending down into the deepest parts of the world, where others would not go. A non-optional condition. 

Now, the energy fluctuations that he had previously attributed to the change in radiation levels and had therefore carefully documented, took on a different, more sinister meaning. Biology and physics, Newt said, were the same. If you go deep enough, peel back enough layers, the base was there. 

An insidious transformation. The Tear had been destroyed, but the Blue picked more holes in the stitches of reality, little by little. Not so much a Breach, and not quite a Tear either, more like a friction burn, wearing down the fabric between their universes.

Hermann tapped his pencil against the notebook, faster and faster, in time with his racing heart. It wouldn't be enough to contain the contamination, to kill and dispose of the animals, not if the Blue changed them, changed the very properties of their reality. 

Newt mentioned terraforming himself. Pockets, folded over in space. Like the map, folded over on itself. Change in the air, and in the water, and the earth. It was in them, too. Tattoos and ligaments, perception and connection. He knew that Newt would run through the tent flap before he even heard his boots, knew what was coming. 

“Hermann! We have to go.” 

He was already standing. “What happened?” 

“I- it’s the creature. I think it’s coming. It’s closer.” 

He didn’t just think, he knew. There was precedence for this too, when Otachi searched for him, was driven to find him via the hive mind- for what? He had assumed to kill him for what he knew and what more he could find, but was that it?

“Hermann?” Newt stepped forward, and Hermann realized he hadn’t moved. “It’s gonna be ok. Ok? It’s fine.” He reached out, for once, to be the one to complete the circle.

They didn’t know that. 

Hermann nodded, and didn’t let go of his hand. “Yes. Let’s go.” 

They ran, leaving behind all of Hermann carefully plotted out points, a map for whoever might find them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it! Thank you all for your support <3
> 
> ***
> 
> Possible endings - Irregularity, Intentionality, Incompatibility, Irreversibility, Individuality 
> 
> They are found and killed by the thing/altered by the mini-breaches/both. It goes badly for them, essentially. 
> 
> They are rescued! Yay. and given medical care. They’re always a little fucked up, but mostly fine, most of the time, and working w k-science to deal with this latest shit storm. 
> 
> They are found and it’s still not good because they are infected beyond repair. But the information Hermann gave them was very helpful, and they themselves are useful, even though they’re going to definitely die. 
> 
> They are found and come to find out that they were like, super wrong. It was all in their minds due to their weird drifts. They’ve been feeding off of each other’s issues which is bad, but shit isn’t actually fucked up, which is good. It’s career ending but not particularly world ending. 
> 
> They are not found because they’ve gone through a mini breach. Whoops. Shit gets insane. Living in a kind of folded over universe. Even more wacky, but not dead! 
> 
> Who knows.


End file.
